Quebec was lovely!

Montreal is a beautiful city!

I had never seen it in this light before!

Stayed at the Marriott in Westmount and it’s such a quaint little place! Loved the architecture.

Normally I don’t care for a lot of statues and stuff sticking out of the brickwork, but they do make it work!

And oh, the Quebecois can really make desserts!

Oh I had the most luscious treats! (And gained about five pounds yikes!!! And my rosacea!!! Ew!!! but oh they were yummy!)

Most everyone I met was warm and gracious!

Went to a school in Pointe Claire yesterday which is a very old English settlement that dates back to the 1700’s. It’s on the shores of Lake St. Louis, and very picturesque, particularly because it was a warm spring day!

We ate lunch on the shores of the lake and I talked to the teacher librarian Sandra Fisher.

The kids were wonderful! As usual.

One little girl came up to me after The Roses in My Carpets presentation and she had this very serious look on her face. She said, “I just loved your presentation. It was just so true.”

And as she stood there in front of me, tears came into her eyes and I told her, “Oh no. You’re going to make me cry!”

And she said again, “But it was so very true!”

And then later these two little boys came up to me and said how much they’d loved the presentation and then the one said, “I just feel like hugging you! You just look so very CUDDLY!” And the boy next to him nodded in agreement.

I just laughed! And I said, “Fine! I’ll hug you!” And so we did! Them doing most of the hugging (because in this day and age you have to be super careful!) and me just patting them on their backs! They were about nine years old.

It was just so funny! They felt like my grandkids for goodness sakes!

But it’s funny because it isn’t always positive.

In one of the schools I went to during the tour, there was a teacher who got quite upset when I talked about wanting to be white and how the kids I grew up with told me and my sisters that they were white because they were clean and we were brown because we were dirty.

The point of sharing this in the Roses in My Carpets presentation was to show the irony that my Afghan refugee foster child had blonde hair, blue eyes and freckles–the one thing that I could have used while I was growing up!

And in talking about all this stuff, the main point that comes through is how silly the whole skin color thing really is!

Believe me, the kids get that the fact that I can laugh at it now, means I have gotten over it!

But apparently this teacher was upset because I didn’t go into how I had overcome my feelings of being ‘dirty’. I just told the kids that I had overcome them and I had come to terms with being a brown Canadian.

And when I heard that, I just looked at the administrators blankly and said, “But that’s another presentation.”

In my A New Life/Coming to Canada presentation, I go into exactly how I overcame those feelings of being brown and dirty, but for the sake of the Roses in My Carpets presentation there isn’t time, I only needed to reference it.

Well, well, you can’t please them all.

When I stayed behind in the hopes of talking with her and gaining insight into her objections, she didn’t come to speak to me. And I thought well, you can’t please everyone, even though, yeah, deep in my heart, I DO want to please them all!

It’s something I’m working on.

LOL.

Oh, so pathetic I know! But I can’t help it.

If she’d brought some legitimate points, I would have found a way to incorporate them into the presentation in order to deal with them, but I never got the chance, so I’ll just chalk it down to an isolated incident.

All in all the most common comment I got from the audiences I spoke to was: “I could have listened to you all day!”

These came from teachers and other students all through out the week!

And a seventeen year old big guy from Shawinigan school, after I’d done a combination of my Get the Bully Off Your Back presentation mixed in with aspects of Wanting Mor. He said, “It’s lunch time and I’m really hungry, but I could have listened to you for another hour!”

I’d say it was a very successful tour!!!

#TDBookWeek