I’m lucky when it comes to in-laws. They’re interesting and funny and generous and kind and smart; all things that I like when it comes to humans. They live in Ontario though, which is perhaps their only flaw. Ontario is too far away. Canada is a big place. It takes days and days and days to drive to Ontario. With kids anyway, in any sane fashion. When we were younger and there were no carseats in the back, we could’ve done it without stopping.
Not so much now.
Cue the plane. The glorious invention that is the airplane. Careening through the air at over 400kms an hour gets us to Ontario in less than 5 hours. Miraculous.
Which puts us at Jack’s sister’s house by the end of the day. How cool is that? And we could all go, even Jack, who misses out on a lot of our camping trips because of work. September is when it starts to slow down at the restaurant and she’s able to take time off. Homeschooling for the win!
Now, if only flying wasn’t so darned pricey. For the time being, we have to make do with visits that have way too much time in between, just as there is way too much space in between our house and theirs. Ideally, they’d live at one end of the block and we’d live at the other.
But there’s more like 3,000 kilometres between their front door and ours, so when we’re able to get together, we make the best of it and moosh in all the family time that we can.
We hung our at their house, enjoying their enormous back yard (oh, how I long for a backyard), we did a road trip to Montreal to see an auntie there, we spent several glorious days at their cottage in Quebec, and then all of a sudden we ran out of days.
We’d used up all ten days that we had (how did they zip by so fast?), and so we had get back on the plane and come home just as the leaves were starting to turn golden; tired and happy and dreaming in French (even if Jack is the only one of us who speaks it).
A bientôt, beloved in-laws. We love you Nathalie, Marc, Isabel, Stéphane, Denise and Cecile.
Merci.
(ps. We’re working on our French. And our Spanish, actually. For any of you looking to add another language to your homeschool rhythm, Duolingo is a great place to start. And it’s FREE.)
