“I keep forgetting to tell you,” Murray says non-chalant-ly one night. “I saw Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, Mon Roi, Oceans 12 and 13) at pick up today. He jumped into a black car with his daughter.” Heart. Skips. Beat. We saw Mon Roi on the flight over and were crazy about it – I even posted it on my Facebook feed. I eagerly sign up for parent/teacher night...

Jet lag has its advantages: 6 a.m. jogs in the Parc Monceau as the sun comes up; endless dark hours to scour listings in search of that perfect Paris apartment. Of course I’ve been scoping listings on Paris version of Craig’s List, LeBonCoin, for months. And Seloger, and SabbaticalHomes, and Book a Flat, and One Fine Stay, and others. I quickly learn that three bedroom apartments are very rare because Parisian families keep them for themselves. “It took us a really long time to find an apartment,” Patricia, a friend of my cousin’s tells me on email...

Don’t get me wrong – we are not Paris neophites. Murray and I have been here together many times, and we’ve come as a family since Charlotte was 2. I worked here often in my 20s as a fashion buyer for Aritzia. We all speak French and have open minded palates. Still, after a 24-hour journey and transatlantic flight with children, sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to consult your Go Go Paris app for the newest, trendiest local bistro within 500 metres of where you are standing...

On August 29, we book into our Paris Airbnb with little drama – it’s a loft close to the Arche de Triomphe with just enough room for our eight suitcases, if you were willing to use them as bar stools. I chose the apartment for its location – equidistant from Emmanuelle’s Collège (she is entering Grade 6), and Charlotte’s Elementary for Grade 2. It’s on Boulevard Haussmann, which is the style of architecture this aristocratic area of northern Paris is known for...

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...