Hello,

We are a homeschooling family of two young girls (5 & 3), living in Lac Brome (Knowlton) in the Eastern Townships. We are looking to do a weekend house-swap with a family in Montreal.

We had a chance to meet some of you at the amazing not-back-to-school picnic held at Beaver Lake in September. We really enjoyed it - lots of great families!

Although we are homeschooling, we would like our daughters to attend Ukrainian school Sat. mornings in Rosemont, just so that they can be exposed to more of their second language - and hear other young children speak it so that they see it is a living language (not many Ukrainians here in Knowlton). The thought of getting up really early Sat. morning to be there at 9 am is not that exciting to us, but the possibility of doing a weekend house swap with another family would be!

We have a large but cozy 3-bdrm home with woodstove and a huge, sun-filled playroom. It's walking distance to the village but bordered by woods with beautiful walking trails - great for nature walks, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. We have a small frog pond that's filled with them in the spring, and across the street is what we think is the world's best sledding hill. Deer sightings in the backyard are a daily occurrence. If you like downhill skiing/snowboarding, we are 15 minutes from Bromont, Sutton and Owl's Head and Jay Peak is pretty close too. We also have a telescope that's great for star gazing and a piano for sing-a-longs. And high-speed Internet. We have a TV but no cable - we're not big TV watchers. You can rent DVDs in town (we connect our laptop to the TV instead).

Lac Brome is made up of several very charming villages that are definitely worth visiting. (Knowlton is a popular day trip for tourists, with its quaint downtown - it offers all the amenities you'd need). The town also just put in a new skating rink. If you'd like to try horseback riding, lots of nearby schools and farms that offer it.

Ideally, we would like a place on the Island that could accommodate a family of 4 (girls can share a room). We lived in Mile End for many years before moving to the Townships two years ago, so around there would be really nice, but anywhere from MTL West to Rosemont would be fine for us.

I don't think we could do this every weekend, but perhaps every second weekend could work. If there are any interested families, we could discuss and see what works for everyone, but for sake of suggesting something, perhaps we could swap every other weekend from Friday evening to Sun afternoon?

Anyone interested? Let me know! You can email me at rhondasherwood@sympatico.ca

Malheureusement, mon post etait trop long pour tout repeter en francais, mais vous preferez communiquer en francais, on peut le faire aussi!

Warm greetings,
Rhonda

PS. Congrats on the new centre - we hope to come and join you in some of your activities - which will be easier for us to do as the girls get a bit older and day-long trips to Montreal become less exhausting!