My sister-in-law regularly travels to Mexico, and I’ve known quite a few Snowbirds who spend two, three, or even four months a year in the south the rest of us stay home to shovel snow.

My parents, on the other hand, stay in Canada year round. But the town where they live is very small and has minimal medical services. When a medical emergency arises people have to be airlifted to Calgary to get the care they need. With a child who is in fugue and doesn’t recognize danger, a visit to a town where the emergency room closes down at night is a little unsettling. This kind of worry comes up as well, every time we talk about moving north, or finding a home in a small town in the countryside.

AeroCare Air Ambulance Service offers an Air Rescue Card™ through the Travel Assist Network. Insurance of this kind would not only cover emergency medical transport, but make sure that we would get our choice of hospitals. If something ever happened to our son we could choose a hospital that had some experience dealing with autism, or we could decide to come home once he was stable enough to be moved. For anyone traveling abroad, this kind of service can make the difference between a long convalescence in a place where they can’t communicate with the hospital staff, and being flown to a hospital right near home, accompanied by experienced medevac specialists.

Travelers are cautioned to check their health insurance plans (provincial and travel health insurance) to see if this type of service is covered. Most of the time only emergency transport is covered, and then only to the nearest adequate facility.

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

When I was about ten I first learned how to make home made paper. I was at an exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre, and the exhibit they were running must have had something to do with the logging industry. We saw films and demonstrations about how trees were cut, and they also gave kids a chance to make their own paper while discussing how commercial paper would be made on the larger scale. (It was also at this exhibit, in an almost neglected corner where they had a greenhouse, that I saw my first herb garden and fell in love forever - but that’s a topic for another post!)

If you get the chance to try paper making at home with your kids, don’t pass it up. But if you are looking for an activity that will be a little easier to set up, just gather up a number of mason jars and have your kids place in each jar different kinds of paper. Good choices are toilet paper (try some marked as biodegradable or safe for septic systems, and a fancier, thicker type that isn’t specifically labeled septic safe,) paper towel (the kind you use at home, and the brown nasty stuff from a public washroom,) paper napkins, and maybe just ripped up looseleaf or printer paper. Try to use the same amount of each one.

Label each jar, and pour the same amount of water into each one. Set the jars aside, and observe them regularly. This project will take some time, so be sure you have space before you start.

In the end, you should be able to see why certain types of paper are safe to flush down your toilet - and others are definitely not!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks!

I have readers from all over the world, particularly North America. Among them are quite a large number of Montrealers, but Canadians from coast to coast visit too. Many of you have children, and I was just realizing that some might want to know things like when that next family allowance cheque or GST/HST credit is coming in. Those who are newly arrived to Canada might also need to know these things exist (we’ve had a number of folks on local homeschooling lists who didn’t know about these benefits, how to get Medicare cards, etc.)

Anyway, I thought it was about time I blogged about some of these things. Particularly after I went to see when the next GST cheque was coming, and the web page I had bookmarked showed only the payment dates for the year beginning July 2008! Well, I googled it and found that the cheques are due tomorrow - that is, 4 April 2008. The dates for the next four payments afterwards are:

July 4, 2008
October 3, 2008
January 5, 2009
April 3, 2009

While I’m at it, the next few payments for CCTB (Canada Child Tax Benefit, the federal family allowance) and UCCB (Universal Child Care Benefit) are:

Folks who receive a federal disability benefit for their child will receive these payments at the same time.

To know if your family is eligible for any of these benefits for the next year, first of all be sure to file a 2007 tax return. You need to check the box to claim GST/HST credit, and only one spouse can claim it. For disability benefits, check with your child’s doctor or social worker. They can help you with the application process.

Family benefits (”family allowance”) are automatically sent to eligible families when children are born in Canada, once the child’s birth is on file with the Civil Registrar (that’s the Registration of Live Birth form your doctor or midwife gives you.) These benefits are calculated according to family revenue, so you must have a current tax return on file. Families moving to Canada from outside the country should contact the Canada Revenue Agency (1-800-387-1193) to find out if they are eligible.

Many families depend on these benefits for the necessities of life. Others put the funds aside to help pay for a post-secondary education fund, or use the money to buy homeschooling equipment or pay for sports and outside classes. Keeping track of when the payments are due will help you plan for these expenses as well!

This work was created by Ruby of Freehold 2, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.

Excerpts copyright quoted authors. Please visit their sites to read more, and respect the terms of their copyrights. Thanks! Dates for benefits payments were taken from the Child and Family Benefits pages at the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) web site, accessed 3 April 2008 @ 9:00. You can download application forms for disability and other benefits from their site.