Sub-letting our house in Vancouver’s leafy Shaugnessy neighbourhood was easy. With the vacancy rate officially at zero, we had brokers banging on our door and several families clamouring for it, most of whom were in the process of building houses or renovating in the area. In the end, though, we leased it to a plastic surgeon in her early 30s doing a residency in Vancouver. “Did you do a contra deal?” one of my best friends joked. Unfortunately, said surgeon specializes in hands. Why she wanted a three-bedroom home on a double lot was beyond us, but her mom paid the rent upfront and that was fine with us...

If you intend to stay in France for more than three months you need a long-stay travel Visa. That’s unless you have an EC passport, like my husband, who has Irish ancestry. Luck of the Irish indeed. The list of requirements for said Visa was as long as my arm – and I’m a long-limbed girl.

Because we travel to the States quite a bit, and were selling a property there, I needed to time the application perfectly, since they would need my passport for more than two weeks. You can’t apply until 6 weeks before your trip, and processing can take 10 business days...

School applications had to be filed by December 31 and involved no less than 30 documents per institution, including formal IQ tests, immunization records, three years of report cards, letters of recommendation for the students and letters of intention for the parents, long form birth certificates, deposits, test fees, and administration fees. In all, I submitted six International School applications between the two girls, and woke up at 5 a.m. to do phone interviews with the head mistress...

The response I’ve heard most when telling people I was quitting my job as the president of a digital media company and going on sabbatical with my husband and two young daughters was almost universal: “We always wanted to do that but now it’s too late.” I admit, it’s a huge luxury to be able to to do this, but with the sale of a property in Palm Springs, California, plus savings, we decided to just go for it. Our children’s school in Vancouver was being rebuilt...