Maternity Leave

I was looking into our company's policy on maternity leave yesterday. I remember learning about it about a year ago when our Employee Handbook underwent revisions, but I just wanted to refresh my own memory. Here's how it works:

I have a standard Monday-Friday, 8-5 job. For the first 10 days (so 2 weeks, or 80 hours), the employee has to use the Paid Time Off (PTO) that they have accrued. PTO is earned in the amount of 6.154 hours per pay period (every 2 weeks). On the 11th day, Short-Term Disability kicks in and pays 60% of the employee's salary (wish it was more, but hey, it's better than nothing!). This lasts for 11 weeks. So in total, I will have 13 weeks of maternity leave. Sounds nice enough, right?

The downside: I just looked at my most recent paycheck and saw that I currently have no PTO. Literally, my balance is 0.11 hours. That's 1/10 of an hour. Which is like 6 minutes. (haha). So, from this point forward, I am going to have to earn my PTO but not use a single hour (or minute!) of it. Starting with our next pay period, going through the end of October (which will be a total of 16 pay periods), I will be able to accrue 98.46 hours. Add that to my current 0.11 hours, and that gives me 98.57 hours. Remember, I need 80 hours of it for those first 10 days of maternity leave. 98.57 - 80 = 18.57. DH and I are going to a wedding in Ohio in June and have already bought our plane tickets, and we are taking 2 days off work. That will be another 16 hours. 18.57 -16 = 2.57. TWO and a HALF hours. That is all I will have left come November. O.M.G. That means I cannot be sick or take a single day off work between now and when the baby comes. All of those doctor's appointments that I'm going to have? I'll have to flex my schedule out, working through lunch breaks or staying late those days to make up the time. I won't be able to come in late when m/s is making me want to vom. Or leave early when I'm about to fall asleep on the keyboard from PG fatigue. God forbid I catch a cold or get the flu and am really sick! I don't what I would do if that happened. I guess I would just have to tough it out.

If I have to use any time off, then I'm going to have to use leave without pay during those first 10 days of maternity leave. Since the following 11 weeks are only going to be at 60% pay, we would really prefer for that not to happen, since we'll be taking a pay cut those 11 weeks.

Plus, we've been planning to visit my best friend in DC in mid-April, so any time off I take for that is going to have to be leave without pay when November rolls around. But even 3 weeks from now when it's time for that trip, I'm only going to have 12 hours accrued, which is only a day and a half! I don't know how we'll pull off a weekend trip to DC in such a short amount of time. DH wants me to take two full days off, but I really doubt I'll get leave without pay authorized for just a vacation. (The Executive Director has to review the request and sign off on it. Yikes.) I mean, they'll have to authorize it in November when I'm on maternity leave. They'll have no choice; I won't be there. But just for a weekend trip? I truly doubt it. And it will make me look really bad, especially in light of the fact that my job performance hasn't been so great lately. (But let's not talk about that.)

This blows.