I can finally say it out loud (and write about it!)...we are moving to England!
We are moving this August to a seaside town in Lincolnshire county, about five hours outside of London. Justin signed a two year full time teaching contract with an awesome school.
We are over the moon excited and have been preparing for this move for a few months now. I think I will break up a big blog post into a few covering different aspects of the move and applying for a permit/visa for Justin etc and the whole process in general. I think that would be best, instead of having one epic blog post that has way too much information in it :)
I guess I will start with how this all came about!
We had literally 24 hours beforehand accepted our fate of spending at least another year (or two) here in town (which wasn't bad, just not what we wanted, since there are no full time teaching positions to be had for a newly non-french speaking teacher in Ontario). We had even discussed finally giving in and buying a television (ours broke a year ago or so and we never replaced it, watching most things we like on the laptop). I think in our minds, buying a brand new electronic was like finally admitting that we were not leaving Canada any time soon.
The very next morning, Justin had an email waiting for him from a recruitment agency from the UK. He has his profile set as public on the teacher list in ON and has "interested in working internationally" checked off. The recruitment lady mentioned teaching in the UK and that if he was interested he could email her back and they could set up a phone chat.
He was going to delete the email, when I said that he should maybe do the phone call for practice. It might be good to start getting use to phone interviews.
If you have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember almost three years ago now that he was offered a position in London that he turned down. That is why he was going to delete the email right away, we thought that it was going to be a similar offer (no relocation, supply work, expensive London). Turns out, the interview went amazingly and the offer was completely different...everything we could hope for! :) Relocation help, full time in one class (over summer pay as well), two years, small seaside town far away from expensive London. Don't get me wrong, we are so excited to visit London and I have always thought it was amazing, but after researching the cost of living there, it was not feasible for us to live there.
The whole opportunity just fit us as a family perfectly. The fact that Justin will get a chance to finally teach, and teach full time is absolutely major.
To say that we are excited is an understatement!
I will sign off for now and continue the next blog post on the things we considered before accepting the teaching offer and relocating to the UK.
