L’s company offers a week of paid parental leave for new parents, which we are hoping to be. Today we were officially told that for adoptive parents, that week off can only be used after the adoption is finalized, which happens many months after placement. In practice, this turns out to be good for us, because otherwise we could lose vacation time we saved up in 2011. In principle, it’s very strange.
This is not the only strange leave policy. So we are officially taking occasional absence days in early December to deal with last-minute house preparations and nursery shopping. Then we are officially taking vacation days for the last couple of weeks of this year, bouncing between home and Florida. We hope to return from this vacation with one amazing souvenir and higher health insurance premiums. We’ll officially go on FMLA leave to care for a newborn at the start of January. And in the late spring or summer, we might finally be able to take an official parental leave. By that time we should have figured out how to be parents, but we still won’t really understand the leave policies.
