Telling the kids

I think I passed over something in my last two posts that was somewhat momentous in its own right. We've told the kids that we're moving to Canada.

I wasn't real keen on the idea myself, preferring to put off the new until such time as I had little choice. Caroline kindly pointed out to me that given that we were telling every man and his dog that we were going, we really did have no choice but to tell them

I think my fear stems from a couple of years ago when we nearly went to New Zealand. There was a day when I went to the map shop and Michael and Sam came with me. When they asked why we were getting a map of NZ, I told them and the immediate reaction was, “I dont' want to go to New Zealand!”

So I had the fear of wailing children within my soul as we sat down to dinner the other week to tell them what was going on.

The reaction was pretty quick ... Michael dissolved into tears ... because “I don't want to go in a plane that goes over the water, I don't like the Sea that's why I don't like canoes and boats and Waaaaaaaaaaa!”

The tears I expected, not the reasoning.

Sam was upset as well, because Thomas was going to have a friend and no one else would!*

Later, Sam was again upset because he didn't want to go to a new school. He was also a little concerned that if he asked one of his friends over, they'd have to pay to fly to Canada and that then they wouldn't only want to stay for one night!

Other than that though, there's been little drama and my fears have been to a large extent unfounded. Of course, its also over 5 months way at this point. I'm sure as we get closer, there'll be some more drama. Some of it might have been mitigated by the lure of toys given that we told them that the power is different and so a lot of our things won't work over there and we'll have to buy some new stuff. Oh and something about a trip to Disney Land too.

They've had questions of course and here are some that have arisen to date:

Will we keep our Xbox? What about all the games?

Can we get a house with a pool?

Can Xavier come for a sleep over? (Tom's friend)

Can we get a play station 3?

Can we get a dog when we are in Canada?

What if I can't charge my game boy?



*The day after I found out that this was going to happen, we found out that one of the family's from the boys school, with a boy in Thomas' class are moving to Toronto ... 2.5 hours from Sarnia!