We’re moving to Toronto

Wow, it feels good to finally share the news… We’re moving to Toronto! This is such a big and exciting move for us and I wanted to share some of the details because I haven’t talked about it at all publicly and it’s a little bit layered. So keep reading to hear a little bit more about our move.

Why are you moving to Toronto?

To understand this, we’ll travel back some years. Ever since I met my husband, Kyle, he’s joked that he’s been trying to convince me to move to Barcelona. It’s half joke/half-truth. I think it became less of a joke post-2016…

To be completely honest, I never really thought I would be someone who wanted to consider a (hopefully) permanent move abroad. I always said that if logistics made sense, I’d be up for a year or two but permanently felt a little too outside of my comfort zone.

During the pandemic, we (like many people) spent time considering other places we might want to live. The only place that we thought we would really consider was New York (duh!) but there were still a lot of things (cost being high on the list) that wouldn’t make sense about that for us.

We bought our current house in the fall of 2020 and it was everything we needed at that time. My sister was living with us as a live-in nanny and our condo felt really small for 4 of us during Chicago winter.

I regret nothing about moving to this house — it has been wonderful, but I do feel like the pandemic sped up a move we wouldn’t have necessarily made that soon.

Overall, even with a great house in a great neighborhood and incredible friends/family, Chicago was missing something for our family. And it felt like there were so many things happening in this country that were making it feel less and less like a place where we wanted to raise our kids.

Anyway, fast forward to last spring. There were three big events back-to-back that pushed me over the edge: The mass shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, then the mass shooting in Highland Park.

I didn’t realize how much everything that was happening politically, etc. over the past few years had been chipping away at me and something really just flipped. As I said before, Kyle needed no convincing to leave.

How did you choose Toronto?

So Kyle and I had actually never visited Toronto before last year. We considered a few places in Europe (Portugal was high on the list) but ultimately decided we wanted to explore somewhere closer to family and friends.

Canada seemed like an interesting option. I mean, that’s where everyone says they’re going when things get bad right? (lol). We had been to Montreal and loved it, but didn’t think it was somewhere we wanted to live. After chatting with friends, a lot of people agreed that we would love Toronto, so we decided to go explore.

Turns out we really did love it. We covered so much ground during that first trip and talked to anyone we could about their experience there. It was pretty much decided after those 4 days that that’s where we would move to… we just had to figure out a “how”.

How are you moving to Toronto?

So as you might have guessed, you can’t just show up in another country and say “Hey, I want to live here now!” Our first step was talking to an immigration attorney to understand our options.

We learned that the “easiest” immigration pathways to Canada from the U.S. are work or school (a student visa). School was something that piqued my interest because I have long considered going to culinary school. It also allows the rest of your family to come with you and get visas too.

So I applied to school and got accepted in late spring. That’s when it became really real. We made a big list of everything that needed to happen, set a move date, and got to work.

Are you leaving The Marketing Greenhouse?

Oh goodness no! The culinary program will only be part-time for 9 months so Jen and I will continue to work and run The Marketing Greenhouse remotely. This isn’t exactly new to us because we ran the business remotely for the first year while also juggling no childcare during a pandemic. This is just a new chapter.

I will miss seeing Jen weekly, but we will still travel to see each other quarterly if not more!

What is the end goal of culinary school?

One of my bucket list goals has always been to write a cookbook. I love to cook, but can only go so far when it comes to developing recipes from scratch. I would love to have a solid grasp of recipe development to share more food recipes on my blog and eventually write a cookbook.

Jen and I have always intertwined our blogs into The Marketing Greenhouse a bit because there is a lot of interesting overlap, so this would also be a natural extension of a lot of the work I’m already doing.

We are so excited about this new adventure and almost can’t believe it’s happening. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, I’ll be sharing so much more along the way.

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