Cedar3

Re: your kids, as I can't comment on the GP side - we uprooted our 5 and 7 year old last year. Their experience of settling here has been pretty reflective of their personalities - my 5 year old is a feisty extrovert who has taken everything in her stride. My 7 year old is much more anxious and has experienced acute times of homesickness that usually manifest at night time despite happily bounding through the day making friends and enjoying the great adventures of being here (much of which involves outdoors activities). The homesickness has floored me at times, I simply haven't known how to help but isn't that the journey of parenting all over? We do our best and I hope he will ultimately feel this move was beneficial but it's possible he'll forever think we should have kept him in England and that's the reality of emigrating.

In terms of school, we dropped our kids into Grades 1 & 3 of a francophone school with no prior learning in French. This was after the summer when we stuck them in skates for the first time and handed them hockey sticks. They are doing great. I guess this tells you something about my parenting style and I expect them to thrive on our shared sense of adventure and a bit of risk and I'm doing my best to provide the support and security they need to do that. We are committed to being here and we believe we are giving our kids more and better opportunities than we were in England. I'm hoping that our conviction will go a long way to helping them settle. We're 8 months in so it's still early days...