And so our quest continues...

I recently wrote about our search for a place to stay. I wish I could tell you we found that one needle-in-a-haystack-pet-friendly-place. I wish I could tell you we found a place with 3 bedrooms. I wish I could tell you that we found a little house at the beach.

Truth is, we saw pretty much all three. But for reasons that I will explain later in this post, we have as of yet not found a suitable place for our family. And the more houses we visit and apply for, the more I start to realize that it may turn out to be a much greater endeavour than I had anticipated. Because the way it looks like right now, all assumptions I had about finding a place to live in Vancouver are wrong...and we basically have a hand filled with short sticks wherever we go.

As a former scientist, I find that when things don't add up the way you anticipated them to add up, it is always a good idea to look at some numbers. Numbers are pretty important. What with square footage, monthly rent and the numbered avenues around here, looking at a housing add can make you feel as if you are looking at a halfway filled bingo ticket. And right away, something else struck me as well. On craigslist, the place where I have been looking for rentals, you can set a number of search filters. At first, we only ticked the box for 2+ bedrooms. And I found that only 1 in 10 ads actually had a rent that started with a 1 (followed by 3 digits...I have seen 1's that were followed by 4 digits.). Menno quickly taught me to set the max. for rent at $2000 so as to make my searches on craigslist slightly less depressing.

Still, the high costs for rentals kept bugging me. How could it be that there basically was no suitable housing for us in our price range? I mean, I know that a scientific career is not the most lucrative one, but it's also not a minimum wage kind of job. But, my assumption that we would be able to easily live of Menno's wage, heck, even easily find a place to live, proved to be wrong. And, when a former scientist says "proved to be wrong", it means she has got the numbers to back it up!

Browsing the "for rent" adds, I found a rental property that was part of a subsidized housing community of Metro Vancouver Housing Corporation. I clicked the link to their website and quickly came to a pdf showing me EXACTLY how wrong I was in thinking that I could easily find a place for our family. Take a look at this page. See if you can find where things don't add up...

http://www.metrovancouver.org/about/publications/Publications/2013_HILs.pdf

Don't feel like reading it all? Well, I'll help you out. This page contains information on Housing Income Limits. A HIL "represents the income required to pay the average market rent for an appropriately
sized unit in the private market." Now, you see, for an average market 2 bedroom apartment, the HIL is $45,500.-. For a 3 bedroom, it is a whopping $55,500.-. So, where Menno's wage might just meet the HIL for a 2 bedroom, a 3 bedroom is clearly out of our league.

But hey, we got that portion covered, right? Remember how I wrote in a post not too long ago about my new found asceticism in relation to worldly goods and housing requirements in particular? By now, I can easily envision us living in even closer quarters than we do now, especially if we have to pay less rent. However, it seems it may not be as simple as that...and, again, I have some data to back up that hunch.

Below the HIL-rates, is a little list of the federal/provincial occupancy standards. The list is very short, so I will copy it here.

Occupancy Standards:
1. There shall be no more than 2 or less than 1 person per bedroom.
2. Spouses and couples share a bedroom.
3. Parents do not share a bedroom with children.
4. Dependants aged 18 or more do not share a bedroom.
5. Dependants aged 5 or more of opposite sex do not share a bedroom.

Although short, I find the implications of these standards to our situation pretty, erm, strong. Let me break it down for you:

1. Aha, so, should we ever manage to find an affordable 3-bedroom place, my daydreams about putting all three kids in one room to sleep in order to have a playroom-annex-guestroom go bye-bye.

2. No more marital feuds for us! What if an inspector came by that one morning a year when I have decided to sleep on the couch. Or what if Menno or myself would ever develop sleep-apnea?! 

3. Yeah right...explain that to my children! Right now, all 3 sleep in one room, which is out of the question because of point 1 anyway, but for sleep deprivation issues, I am still very happy that Eluin slept in our room for as long as she did!

4. HA! Our family is still way to young for that!

5. HA again! No boys!!! *sticks out tongue to the person that came up with these standards* 

Anyway, I feel like I am breaking the rules, or at least know of people that break the rules, which would probably make me an accomplice to that crime. Even more so, I realize that these "occupancy standards" give every rental agency or property owner the right to deny us a 2-bedroom place. Which is exactly what happened with the housing corporation here at UBC which would not allow us to rent a 2-bedroom unit. 

Looking at the evidence, I start to feel pretty desperate about finding a place to live for our family. And yet I can't help but feel that we can by no means be the only family in Vancouver struggling with this issue. I don't know what the solution is. Except for us either moving away or me finding a job. Both seem quite out of reach at the moment. So for now we stick with our strategy of applying to cheap, crappy houses and hope that one day a house owner will favour our family of 5 over 2 UBC students. 

The joy of reading; Jura's story

I learned to read when I was about 4.5 years old. We had spent a day somewhere quite far away from home and on the way back in the train I got bored. My dad showed me a hand-alphabet and wrote a couple of short, easy words with his hands. I was able to read those words. From that moment on it clicked. 

I would read everyday, everything. Not just during those awkward elementary school days, no sir! Especially during my, in my case definitely more awkward, high school days, I turned into a quintessential bookworm. I would be the girl bumping into a lamppost because she was reading a book while walking. My good friend in high school kept me with a steady supply of both hip and new books, as well as the "classics"...in every genre imaginable. To this day, I am forever grateful to him for introducing me to Haruki Murakami, Scarlett Thomas, and, above all, Douglas Coupland (yup, his books are the reason we moved to Vancouver :-) )

For me, reading was like a spa for the mind. Utter relaxation, combined with just the right amount of escapism. Should I be in the unfortunate circumstances that there was nothing actually to read, I would resort to playing wordgames with whatever random written texts I could find, ingredients on milk bottles, streetsigns and, obviously, license plates.

However, with Jura's birth, all of that changed...slowly but surely. The first proper crack in my reading life appeared with the arrival of the last Harry Potter book. Traditionally, Menno and I would wait in line at midnight to obtain one copy of the latest book, go home and spend the next number of days bundled up in bed or on the couch until we had finished reading the book together. With the deathly hallows, however, we figured we would be foolish to think that la petite would leave us in peace long enough to get any simultaneous reading done. How right we were...

Obviously, Nori's arrival did not improve matters and now, with 3 girls and becoming a stay-at-home-mum (don't you just love that word?), my alone time has all but evaporated. Luckily technology came to my aid and with the "night" setting on my iPad, I can still catch a couple of pages before dozing off, even if the lightest-sleeping-toddler-ever is in our bed. 

But, in lieu of reading myself, I now have found a pastime that is at once fulfilling, baffling and slightly more scary too...supporting my kids through their process of learning how to read! That exciting journey started when Jura was about 4,5 years old. She started to get more interested in letters and putting them together to make words, so I looked into ways to foster that interest. In Canada you start kindergarten the year that you turn five. Jura turns 5 in March, so it was a loooooong wait until she could fi-nal-ly go to school in September.

Because of the long wait, and because there is no Dutch school in Vancouver, I decided to try and find some resources to teach her to read myself. As luck woud have it, her grandpa used to be an elementary school teacher and one summer he brought some clandestine reading material to our house! Jura poured over them and enjoyed spelling the letters and turning them into words. You see, although Dutch is considered one of the most difficult languages to learn, learning how to read in Dutch is a breeze! The beauty of the Dutch language lies in the fact that a lot of our letters sound exactly the same when spelled as they do in the word they are placed in. Early reading focuses strongly on words that are "pure-sounding" (so the sound of the spelled letter corresponds with the sound of that letter in the word) and this makes early reading a heck of a lot easier to do! Obviously, not all Dutch words are suited for this type of reading, so the first stories can sometimes be a bit awkward and dull.

That was exactly what Jura ran into after practising her reading for some time. The stories did not make sense to her and she got bored. She wanted to read proper stories! I consulted my Dutch online friends (of which I have plenty ;-) ) and found a great series of early-reading chapter books. Those got smuggled to Canada as well and Jura's interest in reading perked up again...but she was still not satisfied with her own skills. 

In the meantime, she had started kindergarten. Now, here in Canada, kids learn how to read in kindergarten. And, as it turns out, learning to read in English is a completely different process. Because, you see, the relation between what a spelled letter sounds like and what it sound like in a word is complex...to the extent that if letter and word would ever consider counselling, it would make that counsellor very rich indeed! 

To me as a non-native speaker, navigating through the English language is a treacherous ordeal. I mean, can someone please explain to me why I need to pronounce sewing machine as if it has to do something with a female pig? Or what to think of though, through and thorough? How can  one "ough" sound so different? Anyway, one of my assets is that I recognize my limitations pretty well, so I left the learning-how-to-read-in-English to Jura's teacher. As any kindergartener, Jura adored her teacher and took her homework very seriously. In English, one learns to read by whole-word-recognition. You don't sound out the different letters (at least not all of them), but learn to recognize the word as a whole. 

Now, the awesome thing that happened was that because Jura could already spell-and-put-together in Dutch, she was pretty good at recognizing the word, even without the omnipresent picture clues in het homereading books. But what was even sweeter, was that in her mind, the switch was flicked in her Dutch reading from spell-and-put-together to word-recognition as well! All of a sudden she realized that if she had spelled i-k (I in Dutch) once, she did not have to spell it again every time that word came up! All of a sudden, Jura's speed in reading (her biggest dissatisfaction with her own skills ;-) ) soared and she started devouring books. 

Below is a picture of how we generally see Jura now. The lower half of her face seems to be permanently hidden behind a book. Her homereading books, that used to consist of 5 pages with 1 line each, are still handed in the next day for a new one. Even though nowadays, she is reading 60 pages chapter books! In the very unlikely event that there is no book in front of her, she will pause at the most inconvenient moments (think; middle of an aisle in the supermarket with 3 people trying to manoeuvre past her) with a frown on her face...reading the notion posted at the back of the shopping cart about the use of reusable bags and the benefit for the world entire. Yup, I think it is safe to say that in the past 2 years, Jura's reading habits have developed the same OCD-characteristics as my reading once had. 

Nori's story will follow shortly

Home sweet home

Thanks, Ms. 12-hours-to-bedtime, for poking me about taking up my blog again... It's been over a year!

Much has changed, much has stayed the same. But our family is ready for some big changes soon. In August, the lease on our apartment ends. Which means we have to look for a new place to live. Sounds like fun, hey? Well, let me tell you, as much "fun" as it is anywhere else on the planet, Vancouver adds it's own little quirks to the process. Yet, the search for a place to live, has given me a lot of insight in how I have changed over the years I have lived in Canada. That's right. I'm talking about the journey of life here. Brace yourself, I'm going all life lessons on y'all.

Let me take you back to the person I was when we went looking for our first proper house, back in the Netherlands. Back in the days when it was impossible to rent a place in Amsterdam, as it probably still is. Looking for a place to start our family, we found an 1184 sqfeet upper level apartment in Haarlem. It was huge! We spent ages painting all the rooms different colours. Collected a nice set of coordinated furniture. It was bright and sunny...and yet it always felt too small and never quite like home. The floor was too creaky. Only 2 bedrooms with 2 kids already. Too many stairs... I always seemed dissatisfied with the way our house looked and felt, in comparison to other people's houses. I always felt like they did a much better job at house-owning than we did. Although I think most of it had to do with the fact that owning a house is a little too much responsibility for a couple like us.

Fast forward to moving to Vancouver. Before we left Holland, we knew a 2-bedroom apartment was waiting for us. At around 850 sqfeet, quite a bit smaller than what we are used to. Now, picture a huffy, arrogant little European girl walking into our apartment. I am not talking about Jura. I'm talking about how I walked into our little nook after a transatlantic flight, took one look at the kitchen and decided to start looking for another place to live. Asap!

Luckily, I'm married to Menno. And Menno told me to sit tight and see how we did in this house. What a smart idea! Turns out, Canadian dollars run out before you can say "groceries" in our household. And the house, although it is still as pleasing to the eye as a cheap roll of bathroom tissue, has grown on us tremendously! As it turns out, a 2-bedroom easily fits 5 people. True, we could do with some more storage. And some natural light would not go amiss, too. And, the biggest issue obviously for the XX-individuals in our household, we can't keep a pet here. But still, once I accepted the bog roll look-and-feel of our place, we became good friends.

But, all good things come to an end. UBC changed our building from faculty into student housing and is shoving us out...right into the arms of the UBC-sponsored real estate agency that rents out the homes to almost everyone working for the university. True, style-wise these apartments are a big improvement to what we live in now. Better carpets, better lighting, better appliances. Shining countertops and gleaming laminated woodwork. Oh yes, and generally less square footage, too! Even more so, because of our family size, they do not allow us to apply for a 2 bedroom apartment. So, if we want to rent an apartment on campus, our dollars will basically have run out before you can say "rent".

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so we decided it may be worth looking into moving off campus. Even though that means we will be moving outside of the catchment area of Jura and Nori's school, which means we have to apply for a cross-boundary-whatever to keep them in their current school. Which is why we wanted to stay on campus in the first place. But a quick scan of the suites available for rent off campus, showed us quickly how much more square footage you can get for less money off campus. My best friend on campus, who knows stuff, even informed me that the subsidized university housing is prices above market value!

So, we have started our search for a new place. We decided not to wait until the very last moment. Obviously, this is a clear indicator of the  mature and responsible person I have become over the last couple of years. And boy, what a journey it has been so far! Because we feel uncertain as to whether our financial situation will significantly improve over the next year, we decide to look for the cheapest places out there. Admittedly, when the price is low, there usually is a skeleton, or two, in the closet.

The first place we looked at was a basement suite. The place looked like crap. Really. It was small, and the kitchen cupboards showed signs of blistering from some stove-mishaps over the years. The location was amazing, though! We could still ride our bikes to campus. There was a nice big yard. The family upstairs was really, really nice, with 2 big labradors that we could take for walks. They had 2 adult sons living at home, both diagnosed with high spectrum autism. The landlady informed me that we would sometimes hear her boy stomp off to his room and she would sometimes yell at her kids. I replied that as far as the yelling-to-kids was concerned, we could have a little contest ;-) It was actually a nice feeling not to feel too self-conscious about the racket we produce as a family.

Unfortunately, as much as we liked the family and they liked us, someone offered to take the suite right away. And we had to keep on looking. And as much as that wrecks my nerves, because I am scared we will never find a place to live, that first experience taught me a very important lesson, too. With its cracked shower walls, crummy carpets and minimal amount of living space, it could not be farther from our house we bought in Holland. And yet I felt much more comfortable moving into this house than into our "own" house.

I think I have finally come to realize that it does not matter how big a house is or what it looks like, but rather what it feels like. As long as we, as a family, feel it is the right place, it does not matter if we have to sleep 3-kids-to-a-room. Actually, our kids seem to prefer it that way. Our house is no longer part of our social status, it's just a place we call home. And taking off that pressure feels quite exhilarating!