Bonding with your kid.
You’ve made a wrong turn somewhere — or so it seems. Vancouver is impossibly far away; the mountains, the ocean, the transcendent Alibi Room or local microbrewery. Somehow you’re in Southern Ontario, the Niagara Region and you’re not quite sure what to do with yourself, or the pack of kids anxiously biting at your elbows with boredom. Don’t be frightened….
Knee-deep in moving one’s family to a new location, and life gets weighed down with a host of stresses. Already noted is how to make the transition of moving easier for your kids, but what about once you get there? What defines home for a person in a new place?
Seattle: one of the great West Coast cities with its musical history, open markets, outstanding seafood. Oh, and one cannot forget the coffee. That would be criminal. Hitting up Seattle with kids is a cinch. In fact, The Emerald City is probably one of the most kid-friendly I’ve been to.
Aarrr. Ahoy, mateys. September 17th is ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’. As a parents, you probably can’t join the barmaid and Orlando Bloom-inspired parties, but you can have a ton of fun with the kids. Why not have a special treasure hunt? Dress Up in great costumes (why toss those stained jeans when they can be cut off and frayed…
‘Round August, the lineups begin. Phone calls, online research, word-of-mouth conversation at the playgrounds and water parks (much to my dismay). Preschool – the next step to perfecting your child’s success in the world. Or maybe it’s just a way to maintain a parent’s sanity.
Moving to a new home with children requires an almost unfathomable amount of effort. Time, work, the anxious uncertainty that comes with drastic transition. Children, being as intuitive as they are, pick up on these stresses, and tend to emulate them. I say this having moved 13 times in the same town growing up. But there are ways to make the…