Welcome to Canada! Bienvenue au Canada!

Well, it's official! Greg is now a Canadian citizen (and American too). His ceremony was at Grande Prairie Regional College at 8:00 this morning , which meant getting everyone up and out of the house much earlier than usual. First we waited about 15 minutes for the doors to the theatre to be opened, and then we had to wait in a line along with all the other new citizens and their families to have Greg's paperwork checked. There were 113 new citizens (from 37 different countries!) being sworn in this morning, so it took more than an hour to get everyone's paper worked checked by the two clerks at the door (note to Canadian government: would it hurt to hire a couple more clerks for two hours?). The kids were so patient waiting in line for so long!

The ceremony itself was also pretty lengthy, including a speech by the presiding judge, greetings and remarks from the representatives of our MP and both MLAs, and short remarks by the President of Grande Prairie Regional College and the Mayor of Grande Prairie (anyone know why mayors get to be 'Your Worship'?). There were a couple of musical numbers, as well as singing of 'O Canada,' and of course the new citizens had to swear the citizenship oath in both French and English. (Ask Greg how he did with the French!) Greg had to sit in an assigned seat, so the kids were both with me, but they did amazingly well for such a long (and I'm sure boring to them) ceremony, especially considering Abby was due for a nap by the time we got into the theatre and the ceremony hadn't even started yet. The ceremony finally ended at about 10:25.

Here's the announcement of our newest Canadian citizen:


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