I am not the typical immigrant to Toronto. I lived in the city for a little under a year almost a decade ago, my sister and brother both studied in Canada, and I have visited Montreal and Toronto numerous times. I lived in the United States for 10 years so I'm not likely to experience culture shock as I make my way through this city's prominent and well-established bureaucracies. Also, I have friends, former bosses, acquaintances and hundreds of family members peppered across the GTA. Others, I know or have read about, have had a harder time settling in if they are fresh off the boat, that wonderfully pejorative way in which newcomers are labeled and identified; their accents, their expressions, their reactions giving away the discomfort they feel in their new home.

But Toronto is new for me as a mother of two children unaccustomed to a city of services, as Toronto is. I decided to write this blog as I navigate my start here in this city as a parent and a newcomer with a family. What is common about the Toronto we inhabit and how do we access all that this city offers without understanding how it works? Is it still The City That Works as Harper's Magazine coined it in 1975? As I inhabit Toronto in my new avatar with a family divorcing itself from it's other home, I hope that our experience of Toronto will help others who start anew here in Tkaronto"where there are trees standing in the water."