About every 18-24 months.

I’m from Oregon - feel free to DM!

We moved to Australia from the US when our daughter was one. Got her an appointment with a GP right away and brought in all her vaccine info for the GP to input. The Immunisation Register was able to send me the formal document about a week-ish later.

Not being Australian, we had to get IHIs (Individual Healthcare Identifiers) since we do not qualify for Medicare. That process took a bit longer, but we now have easy online access to her records.

Good luck!

I have a Google Voice number and haven’t lived in the US for almost six years. They’ll send you an email 30 days before deactivation, and all you have to do is log in and make a call or send a text to keep it active.

Husband and I are both American, and we’ve lived in Australia for almost six years. We moved just after our daughter turned one.

The separation from family hasn’t been that bad, but I think it’s because 1) my family is spaced out all over the US, and 2) his family is concentrated in the Philly area and we lived in the PNW. So, we didn’t see family all that often anyway.

Technology makes it’s so much easier to keep in touch (we FaceTime/Skype with people much more regularly now than we ever did in the US). I miss my friends, of course, but it forced us to be more social in our new community (not a bad thing), because emergencies have come up when I need someone to pick-up my kid from school, etc.

We obviously don’t have to deal with a language barrier, and there is a lot of cultural overlap between the US and Australia; our transition has been very easy.