Parenting Class

Tonight is our parenting class that we have to attend for our agency.  It's done by a local hospital and is for women and their partners who are about to give birth.  There are four classes in the series with the last one being about newborn care.  We are only taking the last class since we don't need to know about labor and delivery, tour the hospital, etc, etc.  We'll be surrounded by big old pregnant bellies.  That should be a blast.

All joking aside, this is the last thing we have to do before our homestudy.  Speaking of which, it's on Saturday.  Ack!  We've got to do some major cleaning!

Now for a rant: About two months ago we got an email at work saying that our company was going to announce a new maternity/family leave policy at the end of the quarter (March).  Our company has no maternity leave.  Only FMLA which guarantees up to 12 weeks off with no pay.  If you want to be paid you have to use up all of your vacation and sick time.  We can't afford to go three months without my paycheck so I was excited when they announced this.

We got the details about the program yesterday, and honestly, it's more of an insult than anything.  Women who give birth are given two weeks of pregnancy leave followed by one week of parental leave paid at 100%.  After that, she will have access to 100% of her accrued sick pay balance up to 6 weeks for vaginal birth or 8 weeks for a caesarean section.  Following that period, new birth mothers may also use up to 50% of their remaining accrued sick time balance.

Since this is based on giving birth, adoptive mothers are only allowed the one week of parental leave and then 50% of accrued sick days.  That's right.  Whenever we have a baby, my company is SO GENEROUS, that they are going to give me a whole 5 days of pay.  I hope you can read the sarcasm there.  I know that a lot of companies in the U.S. don't have any maternity policy at all, but really.  Five days?  The funny part is that the description of the five day parental leave is for parents to be able to bond with a newborn or newly adopted child under the age of 18.  All of this is in response to feedback from employees wanting a better work/life balance.  Give me a break.  Right now I have about 20 sick days accrued.  So if we had a baby right now, I would get 5 days paid, then I would have 10 more days of sick time that I could use.  Wow a whole three weeks.  Daycares won't even take a baby until they are 6 weeks old.

Besides which, I'm taking the full 12 weeks off.  I have no choice in going back to work, but I'm going to delay it as long as possible.  Under FMLA, I can use all of my sick time and vacation days, which is what will happen.  All of the discussions around this new policy are in response to people complaining about going on maternity leave and exhausting all of their vacation and sick time.  When they come back to work with a 3 month old baby they no longer have any sick days that they can use if the baby gets sick and they have to stay home with him/her.  This new policy doesn't do much to alleviate that problem, especially for adoptive parents.  It blows, but there's not much I can do about it.

I did the calculations and if I don't use any sick days for the next 18 months, I will have exactly 12 weeks paid time off after which I'll be tapped out.

Can someone find me a job in Canada???