Originally Posted by daunted (Post 5538242)

Just thought I would share a little 'exercise' i did with my children this week, it worked for us and may help someone else:confused:
I have 3 kids (19, 14 & 12) and throughout this whole process we have all been in a state of euphoria, for want of a better word BUT it dawned on me this week that is isnt natural to make such a life changing move without any worries! SO i decided to play counsellor :rofl:
I got 4 sheets of A4 paper and folded them in half. On the left i put a title ' what worries me' and on the right i put title 'solutions'.
Everyone, included me, went off with our sheets of paper and listed any concerns we had, no matter how trivial or silly they seemed.
We then all got back together on the floor in the living room (no furniture left to sit on!) with out sheets of paper.
It was an eyeopener cos we all shared pretty much the same concerns; fitting in, making friends, missing family at home, school work being different, and for me finding work and keeping a roof over our heads!
We then started filling up the right hand side of paper with how we would handle each situation, from visiting the leisure centre and joining sports clubs for my son in particular, finding families on here with kids same ages which has already come up trumps, setting up skype, deciding that maths is maths world wide, 1+1 still = 2 even if you are in Australia, making sure that we had given all family and friends lessons in msn and skype, checking out the schools curriculum. For me and the work issue i spent a whole night emailing my resume to loads of employment agencies and companies, hotels etc (Im a chef) - I now have at least a dozen replies from agencies saying they have work for me on arrival, offer of job at a hotel and offer of temporary short term work to tide me over if things get hard waiting for proceeds of house sale to arrive in bank account. We found some children already at the school they will prob be going to and my daughter is now chatting to them online - infact she is adamant she wants to go straight to school to get the last week of the school year in before they break up for holidays:eek::blink: (strange girl)
But biggest thing that came out of it all is that everyone is now happy to admit that they have concerns and just by speaking up about them doesnt mean you dont want to go and you are not disappointing us as their parents by speaking up!

Ok - not really sure where this thread is going BUT it worked for us - we are now realistically euphoric:wub: