We The Norths by Nick North

We The Norths by Nick North Nick North is your friendly neighbourhood of 5 + Wallace the super dog! Brand Consultant, Sales Coach, Awesomeness Expert.

06/12/2026

It’s Graduation weekend and I’m just barely hanging in there!

The end of the school year grind is taking me out.

It’s all great stuff! Thrilling stuff! But a lot of stuff all at once.

High school graduation, elementary school graduation, end of year band performances, dances, baseball playoffs, and my own attempts at joy mean I’m fueled entirely by Yerba Madre.

Not sponsored but will work for “enlighten mint”. 🤪

05/29/2026

Remember being a kid and feeling like Summer Break couldn’t come fast enough?

Like you physically could not sit through one more day of school. One more lesson. One more test. One more anything.

I was SO done being a kid.
Now I’m done being an adult. 🤦🏻‍♂️

Anyone else nostalgic for Summer Break?
Or am I alone in this one?

Should we all move to France or what?

05/20/2026

Something I wasn’t expecting to admire in Mexico: the way people just… gather.

After work, a handful of guys outside the corner store with a beer, laughing.

Older folks with their chairs pulled out onto the sidewalk, deep in conversation.

Families and friends standing around eating 8 peso tacos late into the evening like there was nowhere else on earth to be.

And on the beach, with nothing but a cooler, an umbrella, and some plastic chairs.

No agenda. No timeline. Kids running wild until they fell asleep on someone’s lap, long after I’d have bundled mine up for a bath, a book, and a reasonable bedtime back home.

So we did as the Romans(errr Mexicans) do.

We stayed. We lingered. We played cards under twinkle lights with nowhere to be and no one checking the clock. And I’ll be honest — it felt just as wholesome as any bedtime routine I’ve ever enforced. Maybe more so.

It got me thinking.

I’ve spent years believing that the structured, scheduled, early-to-bed way was the right way. The wholesome way. The good parent way. And I wonder now if I absorbed that belief from growing up without much of it.

Overcorrecting for something that maybe didn’t need soooo much correcting.

Because watching those families on the beach, nobody looked like they were doing it wrong.

Maybe it’s not better or worse.
Maybe it’s just… different, and a little less lonely.

Danger turned 18! And yes, that makes me feel a little bit more “Unc” than I’d like to admit, but even more so it makes...
05/12/2026

Danger turned 18! And yes, that makes me feel a little bit more “Unc” than I’d like to admit, but even more so it makes me overwhelmingly proud.

Proud of who she is, proud of who she’s becoming and proud of all the little ways she’s figuring that out.

When I started this little instagram account back in the day it was called “EpicDanger”. It was just me figuring out who the hell I was alongside these two wonderful little humans I’d created.

Even though I was the parent, as a fresh faced 23 year old figuring out life, in a lot of ways she grew up right alongside me.

As much as I’ve been lucky enough to be there for all her big moments: the rapping elf performances, the split lips, the triumphs, the heartbreaks, the love of cowgirl hats and sparkly red boots, toothless the dragon, and frogs in the Bayou–and somewhere in the middle of all of it, becoming the most incredible big sister.

She was there for many of mine.

She’s watched me go from a corporate job, to stay at home parent, to a scrappy business owner.

I watched her move from crawling to walking, training wheels to two wheels, and then eventually back to four wheels on her very own car.

She stood beside me, squeezing my hand, every step of the way as I transitioned from mom to dad. And I watched her find her own style, swagger and way in the world.

Together we’re figuring out our confidence and authenticity, our passions and boundaries. Sometimes clumsily, but always with humor and style. (Her with significantly more of both than me.)

Words can’t express how lucky I am to be her Dad.

Or how grateful I am to have a front row seat to everything she’s becoming, still squeezing my hand from time to time.

Happy 18th, Danger!

You just keep getting better!

What’s the wildest part of having 5 kids? The luggage required for going on vacation, even while traveling “lite” is up ...
04/28/2026

What’s the wildest part of having 5 kids? The luggage required for going on vacation, even while traveling “lite” is up there! It’s actually kind of hilarious! Plus multiple hotel rooms, and Ubers, and tables and rows on airplanes! You should see us casually ordering breakfast!

Plus shoes!! Always the shoes! We’ve definitely got at least 15 pairs packed with us!

I kinda love it! But I low key need a vacation just from the project of getting us all out the door on vacation!

04/22/2026

4 Ferries, 2 hotel rooms, a day and a half of missed work.
All to realize I didn’t just raise some kids. I raised my replacements!

Let me tell you. This body isn’t built for the pit anymore. But they are carrying the torch and then some.

If you get the chance to take your teens to a show, or whatever their fave artist is, you should 💯 do it.

Grateful the invite me to tag along and observe them in the wild!

I want to inform you that Sir Bas passed quietly in the night this weekend.The thing nobody warns you about when you get...
04/06/2026

I want to inform you that Sir Bas passed quietly in the night this weekend.

The thing nobody warns you about when you get chickens is how much dying goes into this much living.

When we first started losing birds, the kids were devastated. Sobbing. Full theatrical backyard grief. I wasn’t much better honestly.

Now they’re sad — genuinely sad — but they sit with it differently.

We gather up our favourite memories of the chicken. How we got them/hatched them. Their funniest moments. The particular chaos they brought to the yard. And then we send them back to the land they loved.

I didn’t plan for the farm to teach my kids (and let’s be real, me) about death, grief and letting go. But here we are.

They’re learning that loss isn’t a malfunction.
It’s just as much a part of the same cycle as everything else they love about this place.

Watching them hold that, with sadness but without panic, might be one of the best things this ridiculous farm life has given us.

But this one hits different.

Bas was our big, gentle boy. First one out of the coop every single morning. He kept all his ladies safe and had the grace to let Latke, our tiny delusional little rooster, strut around like he ran the whole operation.

He never needed to take that from him.
That’s the kind of sturdy and confident I want to be.

Opening that coop this morning without seeing his head pop out knocked the wind out of me.

We’ve been scaling back our roosters. Scaling back the whole flock. It’s a lot, this many kids and this many roosters— and frankly this many neighbors.

So maybe this is the end of an era.
Or maybe grief is just trying to convince me it is.
Only time and my broken heart will tell.
Either way Bas will be missed!

Rest easy big guy. Strong, gentle, and completely unbothered by Latke’s delusions of grandeur.

And thanks to for giving us Bas all those years ago.

I always hated my birth name.As a kid it felt bunchy. Like it didn’t fit right in my mouth, or anywhere else for that ma...
03/23/2026

I always hated my birth name.
As a kid it felt bunchy. Like it didn’t fit right in my mouth, or anywhere else for that matter. And as a trans guy in this world, it’s actually kind of dangerous.

But even when I was playing life in “girl mode” — pretending I loved the Backstreet Boys rather than wanting to be the Backstreet Boys — I avoided saying my full name whenever I could.

Nick always felt better. Nick always felt like me.

And yet, ten years into confidently knowing exactly who I am — Nick North — I was still walking around with ID, bank accounts, and even library cards with the wrong name on them.

Until this month.

After a lawyer, a very patient wife, thousands of dollars and 18 months of bureaucracy…
My driver’s license says Nick North.
My passport says Nick North.
My bank account says Nick North.

And I almost didn’t let myself celebrate.

I told myself, it’s nothing special.
That actually, it’s more embarrassing that I didn’t do it years ago.

Good thing Katherine is great at laughing lovingly at me when I do that.

So little Nick — the kid whose name never fit — celebrated exactly the way he always imagined grown up, sturdy, confident, successful Nick might celebrate.

Steak with my beautiful wife.

A hotel room booked under my real, legal, right-for-me name.

And a show where I emo-screamed every word to Hands Down with my whole chest and even bought a shirt from the merch table so I’d never forget it.

“This is the best day I can ever remember, I’ll always remember.”

Because it was definitely up there.

I fixed a fence last week and it kind of blew my mind.Wallace had been using their giant bowling ball head to ram throug...
03/13/2026

I fixed a fence last week and it kind of blew my mind.

Wallace had been using their giant bowling ball head to ram through the chicken run fence for months. Eating eggs &chicken p**p. Living their best life. I kept patching it. Pretending that was enough.

Last week I just fixed it. 45 minutes. Done.
And then I just stood there.

Because six years ago I would have stood in that same yard and decided I was a loser imposter of a man who doesn’t even know how to fix a fence.

One setback. Total failure as a human.
That was the math my brain did.

Super smart brain people call this all-or-nothing thinking — one setback becomes a full dramatic conclusion about your entire identity.

You don’t just struggle with a fence. You are someone who can’t do things. You don’t make a mistake. You are a mistake.

And then your brain does the opposite when things go right. (hedonic adaptation for all the nerds out there)

Every win gets quietly filed under normal and forgotten.
No celebration. No acknowledgment. Just: cool, next problem.

So you get the worst of both worlds.
Failures feel like they define you. Successes disappear the moment they happen.

I’ve been walking around for years becoming someone I would have genuinely admired six years ago and I didn’t notice a single moment of it.

I just kept collecting evidence that I wasn’t enough.

I don’t have a clean ending for this, but I know I don’t want to live like that anymore.

I want to actually stop and celebrate the fence I just fixed. Let it mean something.

And when the next thing breaks — because something always breaks — I want to let that just be what it is.
An unlucky setback. Not a conclusion about who I am.

Just a thing that happened.
That I’ll probably figure out too.

It’s 2016. Photos are square and I’m a little baby q***r who’s wildly in love with . I’m living in Alberta and running a...
01/15/2026

It’s 2016. Photos are square and I’m a little baby q***r who’s wildly in love with .

I’m living in Alberta and running a web development company with my best friend terrified to come all the way out as my truest self.

My babies are still babies. My big kids are still little. Danger gets her ears pierced and Epic falls deeply in love with Japanese food!

My soul dog Stella is still with me. ❤️

And when I tell my friends the truth about who I am they rally around me and show me I’m exactly who I am meant to be.

I fall deeply in love with a chicken for the first time and dance my heart out.

We blend our families, and K & Adventure move to Canada.

We get married in a field, with just our kids, & and making pictures of it all.

We take the kids to see Tegan and Sara and K and I have our first big bad terrible fight. Spoiler alert. We made it through. 🤪🥰

We get our first set of matching Christmas Jammies, and have our first magical Christmas.

The kids keep becoming even more themselves.
The dab is still alive and well.

Adventure learns to bake, and the tradition of creating her birthday cake together begins.

One of my photography hero’s becomes a real life friend when creates family photos for us that I’m still obsessed with all these years later.

At the time I think life as a trans person might always feel scary, and that being myself means that I am choosing a life of pain and suffering.

Ten years later I know differently.

Life as myself, just keeps getting better.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t still hard moments.

It doesn’t mean that some people still don’t like who I am, or how I live.

But all these years later I like who I am.
And it turns out that counts for a lot more than I realized.

2026 felt impossible to 2016 Nick.
I wonder what is possible in 2036.

What a life! 🥹

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Salt Spring Island, BC

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