A Total Change - Moving To Canada!! 🐻

 Soooo lockdown and Covid has been a bit of an inconvenience this year, but on the plus side it's given us time to have a think about what we really want and life goals, you know, all those big things that get repressed during a normal year. 

We eventually came up with the desire to try living somewhere else for a while as a good goal, more of an emigrating type rather than the temporary 6 months we did on our Spain visit. We finally came up with these criteria:

🐻 Must have seasons, I'm tired of grey and rain                        

🐻 Must have a great home ed community                                  

 🐻 Preferably English speaking so we can integrate more easily

 🐻 Lots of interesting things to do and see and good food          

Photo by Andre Furtado from Pexels

I did a tonne of research (as I love to do!) and Canada really seemed to hit our main needs, the country looks beautiful, it can't be any rainier than North West England and the eating out scene is perfect for foodies! So my husband went about the difficult task of finding a job; luckily for us he's a highly experienced software developer and so this falls well for getting a job in a lot of other countries including, yay, Canada. 

For other software developers we found and can highly recommend the recruitment agency VanHack, who also, very helpfully guide you through the whole immigration process and have been great so far. 

It's been stressful in places but we're now well on the way, we've 🤞  sold our house, I'm daily blitzing stuff we have into donate, sell, store and to take piles and our work permit application (along with the very large list of accompanying paperwork) is in. 

We had a lovely jaunt *sigh* down to London one day - I do love a 2:30am start for a cross country trek - to get our biometrics done. Luckily there was only one hairy moment when we realised we were missing an essential bit of paperwork that hadn't been printed off and the Canadian website simultaneously was down for maintenance (gaaahhhhhh). A huge bit of good fortune meant the site was back up and running at the same time as our appointment and the shop down the road printed the precious paper for us then we were back on track.** 

So the year is ending with a huge adventure in sight; a house move, a big de-cluttering of stuff and a lot of excitement sprinkled with a bit of sadness at leaving certain things behind. It's going to be very interesting packing all that is precious up, along with shifting two kids and dogs across a vast ocean to another continent!  I'm keeping everything crossed it can go as smoothly as possible.

**{For anyone planning to get this done you need to print off the letter on your actual application from the Canadian government site to take with you, it wasn't made very clear on the e-mail for the appointment that you need this and they won't let you do biometrics without it.}