Canadian Thanksgiving

Today is our first Thanksgiving in Canada and we are thankful to be settling well here.

As Mike posted on Friday, he has received a job offer and will begin work on Tuesday. He feels that the company is a good fit for his personality and skills, and I am pleased that he has flexible hours and the ability to work from home from time to time. This means that I do not need to worry about sorting child care arrangements on the days that I go to class early or return late.

Sarah has settled really well in her new school and is working hard and making friends. She likes her teacher, who is very kind and gentle in personality, a lot, but also acknowledges that her last teacher in England was a good fit because she was "very strict and old-fashioned".

Sarah has been in a phase recently of challenging the authority of her parents on a regular basis - either explicitly or through a strategy of sustained passive resistance (i.e. ignoring us, "forgetting," not "hearing" us, or retreating to her room and then ignoring us). Very annoying.

She recently employed a strategy that I remember well from my own childhood. When asked to clean her room, she showed us a very clean room and was released to go out and play. The next day, while trying to track down her school planner, I happened to open the closet door and encountered a small avalanche of books, toys, papers and dirty laundry.

An alternative strategy is arguing that as she is only 7 years old, we are unreasonable in our expectations that she clean her own room, keep track of her own school books, put away her own laundry and help around the house. We are ogres! She is the only child her age in the whole school who has to be responsible for such odious tasks!

We are also, apparently, (and sadly), no longer the experts in everything and the masters of the universe. Dang! I had hoped that we could stretch out the good times for a year or two more. We are responding to the insurrection by trying to judiciously mix redirection, discussion, reminders, and consequences, with mixed success, (although we are optimistic that the surge will be ultimately successful!)

School is also going well for me. I received my first paper back with high marks and have heard that my grant application was ranked highly before being sent off to the office of graduate studies for further ranking before (I hope) being sent to Ottawa for final consideration. If awarded this grant, it will be for 20k-35k a year for the duration of my time in the program, so it is a pretty big deal. I'll find out in the spring if I've been funded. I'm getting ready to submit my first independent journal article and hope that it is accepted for publication.

I am today preparing our first turkey dinner in a couple of years (our oven in England was too small for a turkey) and looking forward to consuming all of the fixings. This year's menu is traditional with no gourmet touches - Roast turkey, dressing, mashed sweet potato, green beans, butterflake rolls, gravy, cranberry sauce, pecan pie and pumpkin pie.

Canadian Thanksgiving is not the unrestrained orgy of eating that kicks off the excesses of the Christmas season ... that is the particular joy of an American Thanksgiving. My advisor lived in the states for a while and says that he never misses a year in America for Thanksgiving as it is more fun. Here it has traditionally been a liturgical festival. Although there is a national holiday on Monday, dinner is traditionally eaten on Sunday, according to my informants. So, that is what we are doing.

It has been interesting to participate in the immigrant experience in Canada. About 20-25% of Vancouver residents are immigrants, so I meet people everywhere I go who are recently arrived in this country. There is, at least in the newspapers I have read, almost no anti-immigrant sentiment expressed. This is very different from the US and UK and I want to find out more about it as one would think that the tensions involved with a large influx of people from different cultures, speaking different languages etc, would be similar.

I have been avidly following the US election on TV and in the blogosphere. We have elections in Canada this week and provincial elections in November, but many Canadians are more interested in what is happening in the US this year. I sent in my absentee ballot last week. Bush is in the last 100 days of his presidency, thank goodness. I am dismayed by the Republican vice presidential candidate and have

Sarah and I have been taking a family art class on Saturday afternoons and it has been a lot of fun doing that together.

Well, into the kitchen for me now ... pie crusts and potatoes to peel and a turkey to stuff await me!

Love,
Margo