Oh, Canada (Anna and Caroline)

After years of bureaucratic hoop-jumping, we became Canadian citizens today! That is, two of us became Canadian citizens, and Emma came along to offer her support and advice (she had an air of been-there-done-that about her; she, after all, has been a citizen FOREVER - since birth, in fact).

Our final step in the process (after interviews, paperwork galore, an exam, medicals, police checks, etc) was to turn up to a citizenship ceremony and take the Oath.

We dressed Emma up in a little Canadian outfit her Grandpa had bought for her (thanks, Hans/Dad!). It was covered in red moose (mise?) and maple leaves and had Canada printed across the chest, in case there was any doubt about our patriotism.

When we arrived, one of the volunteers looked at the sleeping Emma sprawled in our arms and said, "You'll have to hold the baby on your lap. There aren't any extra seats." Man, this is Canada, and they can't even give us a seat for our six-week daughter?! We assured her that Emma would probably not mind having to share. Maybe once she's seven weeks, she'll resent not having her own...

We spent most of the ceremony watching Emma carefully to see if she was about to blow. Then, just before we were due to say the Oath, she woke up, got hungry and starting bleating. Ever prepared, we popped a bottle of expressed breast milk in her mouth. To take the oath, we had to stand up and raise our right hands. So Anna had Emma in her left arm, and her right hand raised. Caroline used her left hand to hold the bottle firmly in Emma's mouth, with her right hand raised. It was quite the spectacle. Luckily, we made it through with a quiet baby and didn't have to leave the room, although we must confess that we giggled our way through the entire Oath and were thinking more about Emma than about Queen Elizabeth II and her successors.

Then we were honoured with a speech about what it means to be a Canadian citizen. Apparently, they felt the need to simplify things for us all. The two things apparently we have to do as citizens are 1) turn off our lights (and, therefore, "save the planet") and 2) shovel our neighbour's snow. If we do that, we can become prime minister. We're paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it.

When we were given our certificates, the judge kept saying "Welcome to Canada". Slightly odd, given that Caroline has been here since she was 13 and even the newcomer Anna has been here for 8 years. But, perhaps beforehand we were merely tolerated rather than actually welcome.

So now we are Canadians. We still don't put "eh" on the ends of our sentences and neither of us follow hockey, but apparently those are acceptable transgressions...as long as we turn off our lights.