well, I'm in grad school and started a little late though I'm well within the normal grad school ranges and not yet old enough to have really acquired the sheen of maturity or cool reserve of self-confidence.
I do, however, work with a lot of non-traditional students and count them among my better friends in grad school. They tend to be less angsty.
My suggestion would be to try to get an in with the grad school crowd, though I know little about its particular Canadian manifestations, and faculty. They will have a lot of good advice on your situation as they will be dealing with a lot of similar issues survival wise. They're the ones who will tell you how to enroll your kids in various 'student' day cares.
The local one is labelled as the Early Primate Lab, it was originally an Anthropology project.
The other thing I highly suggest doing is patronizing whatever support centers your university offers. In America I would like for writing labs, tech centers, teaching learning and technology centers, and so forth.
Writing center are where I and my friends work, and you are almost certainly a much much better writer, arguer, and researcher than the kids I deal with. Conventions change very regularly, however, and non-traditional students are often at a disadvantage since they haven't been watching them change the whole time.
One of my very best friends recently got into a tremendous amount of trouble because she improperly cited images in a document and thus inadvertantly plagiarized a huge chunk of 'text.'
Not a situation anyone with her talents or ethical character should have been in.
