Gathering Stories: Did you have paid family leave?

What kind of paid leave did you get when your child came into your life?  Most of the families we know had to use a combination of sick and vacation days with additional unpaid leave to get any time off with their child.  Others have done the same to care for a sick loved one.  And those are the ones lucky enough to have sick and vacation days.  What did you have?  How did it work out?

We're gathering stories here to paint an anecdotal picture of how this issue looks for Oregon families, how we're arranging maternity and paternity leave, caring for our newborns, adopted children and other loved ones.  Each family - each birth, really - has its own unique interaction with paid leave.  But usually it's a factor, somehow.  How did it affect your choices? 

Please tell your story as a comment to this post.  They will be helpful in conveying how much our lack of paid leave is affecting our choices, our workplace productivity, and our families.

Comments

[Anna]

I also used a combination of saved sick and vacation time which got me through a few weeks. I had been paying in to a short-term disability plan that, after quite a bit of paperwork and multiple conversations with HR, helped in a very limited way. The plan had a 30-day waiting period and then considered the recovery for a vaginal birth to be 6 weeks so the plan paid me some percentage of my salary (the details are a little fuzzy now) for 2 weeks. And because I had been at my job less than a year before taking leave, my employer did not cover my health insurance premiums for the last 2 months of my leave. As the original poster stated, I know I am lucky. I was able to take almost 4 months of leave and managed to get a little bit of it paid. But 15 months later I still feel like I'm paying for it (trying to make up for lost income and working to build up sick and vacation time) and I can't help but think that it shouldn't be this hard.

[Lisa]

I didn't. But of course nothing is quite that simple. I sort of did. I used sick and vacation days that I had saved (fun), plus some advanced sick days and unpaid time off (which we were lucky enough to be able to afford). As a result, I returned back to work with a 3-month old baby at home with no vacation days, a negative balance in sick leave, and a balance due on my insurance premiums for my unpaid time. And I was lucky.

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