Sending my Son off to China in just over a Month
The first month of summer vacation has flown by, and it's becoming more of a reality now that in just over a month I'll be dropping my son off at college on a whole different continent!
He's been all excited about buying things to bring with him and packing, but so far to be honest, I've been just putting off thinking about it. The visa process was pretty stressful, not for him because he had a letter of invitation from the school, but actually for me, who was just going to be in the country for 5 days to drop him off. There is a policy specific to China where if you (in this case, me) are born in the US (so, a US citizen) to parents who are from China, before those parents attained permanent residency or citizenship status in that other country, you can't travel with a visa. My parents technically were Taiwanese citizens who were born before Communist China was even created as a country so technically this law should have been irrelevant, AND they had already attained PR status at the time of my birth, but they had to return their Green Cards (proof of their PR status) when they became US citizens, and so the guy I hired to submit my visa application in Washington, DC said my only recourse was to submit a request to the government to find these document (if they even still exists because that was almost 50 years ago ... before the internet existed!) to submit along with my visa application.
Now, for reference, our flight leaves 7/31 PM, and it was basically the end of May when we started to realize that we were going to run into issues with my visa. I submitted this Freedom of Information Act request on 6/5 online, but the projected "date of completion" of this request was going to be 7/16! Cutting it way too close if you ask me. Thankfully (and here is where I give a shout-out to my awesome parents), my parents flew back to Maryland to look into their records they had kept, and found not the official Green Cards, but basically correspondence to them dated before my date of birth where their PR status was recognized, and all was good. Chinese Consulate - 0, Dr. Cevey's parents - 1! For anyone who's wondering, I just checked the status of that records request – glad to share that my place in the queue is down to 3955 from 7245 when I first submitted the request! (Insert eye roll emoji) My parents deserve to be considered for the "Best Parents in the Whole Wide World" award given that fact!
Anyways, now that that's behind us, I guess it's time to face reality and think about this trip as a concrete reality. One thing I did already arrange for is for Dr. Day to cover for us for all the days that I'm gone. Like I said, I'm leaving in the evening on 7/31. I come back to work on 8/12, and I trust that she and the rest of my staff are going to be awesome at taking care of all of y'all during that time.
May Practice Topics with Cevey Pediatrics
(click on each topic to learn more)
We've updated our appointments policy at Cevey Pediatrics. It is our intention to provide your children the best care possible at all times and to accommodate as many requests as is realistic and feasible. It is within this context that we ask you to take a few moments to review our new policy below:
Cevey Pediatrics Appointments Policy
