<p>G’day everyone! </p>
<p>H and I are back in Oz (Sydney) sans D - and probably only now can be said to have begun to be coherently collecting our thoughts. To each of you and your families, thanks for contributing to this thread and our best thoughts are with you, especially during this amazing developmental time for all.</p>
<p>Our D likes her suitemates, adores her campus and its facilities and activities, and loves her classes, but really, really dislikes being so far from home, even with a great familiarity of her university and a few family members and cavalcades of in transit friends about, which is fair enough. Being an individual means that each of us has a different take and different requirements, particularly during these sorts of huge transitional times. Separation matters were a little fraught for our D - and thereby us (though also us separately) - for the first week around move-in and orientation, and by sheer coincidence I came across and procured a copy of a recent book, ‘What to do when college is not the best time of your life’ (Columbia University Press, 2010). The author, David Leibow, is an M.D. and on the faculty at Columbia. The chapters on homesickness and ‘For Parents’ were apposite in our case and I commend them to anyone who is interested. </p>
<p>Like many of you are commenting, contemporary communications tools are truly impressive (though, as an aside and not only for purposes of sentimental pining, I do wonder whether the concomitant lack of time to reflect may be problematic; perhaps the very act of composing and sending letters and waiting for responses and/or infrequent telephoning owing to cost in days of yore might have had a few advantages after all? Mind, I’m not certain we would have wanted our D be halfway round the world if the old-style tools were the only ones available - though who knows?). And like all of you, our family is settling into new communication routines. </p>
<p>H and I return to the States to see our D in a few weeks pivoting around Parents’ Weekend. In the meantime, each of us is getting used to being apart and, of course, particularly delighting in the good bits of our D’s new journeys. Earlier this week she texted ‘Odysseus sends his kingly greetings’, which had us roar with laughter. Academically, she reports that she’s swamped, though not as much as her final year in secondary school. (‘But still … .’, she said.) Simultaneously we hope that she’s eating alright (because much on offer ‘is pretty dismal’), sleeping on the odd occasion (‘I’ve got so much to do’), and just plain having fun ('Oh, I went to x-function and it was so good!). </p>
<p>We hope the same for each of your young people, too!</p>
<p>Again, our gentlest thoughts for each of you.</p>
. We get to see her next weekend for family weekend. I think she is satisfied with our once weekly skype talk and sending brief messages during the week. I am adjusting…:)</p>
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