To hunt or not to hunt that is the question

Job Hunt that is....

Let me begin by saying how much I LOVE my current job.  I adore it here.  I love my boss.  I love the support staff and coworkers.  I even love what I do.  It has been my dream come true ever since this job fell, quite literally, into my lap about 2 days before I was supposed to start looking for work.

My current boss is a contact from my last job.  A job that was a 4 hour commute (each way) from my home.  It was a commute I did on a weekly basis which meant that from 4am Monday morning until 4pm Friday night I didn't get to see my boyfriend cum fiance.  When we got engaged things started to get tough at my job.  They were pushing for me to move to the far away city and I flat out told them it would not happen.  My fiance had been in the same job for 24 years, a union job, good pay, excellent vacations and benefits, he was not going to start again.  And while I enjoyed many things about my last job the hours were not on the list.  When I left I was gifted with my overtime payout.  It equaled a month for every month I had been employed.  I worked a minimum of 70 hour weeks.  This I do not miss.

Unfortunately my current job is a contract that is going to expire at the end of July.  I know my boss likes me, but I also know that there are funding issues and cutbacks and all the rest.  I have to be realistic about the fact that he may not be able to keep me around.

Then there is the problem, the dream that so many of us face.  I am pretty sure, at some point, some how I have a chance of being pregnant.  There is that concern... how will it look if I find a new job and I get pregnant after only a few weeks?  What about the time I may need to take off for fertility treatments?  Is it fair to accept a job with the clear intention of trying to leave it almost immediately for a maternity leave?  It is entirely possible to blow off good reference and future employment possibilities this way.

It isn't that we can really afford for me not to work.  In fact I bring in a higher income than my husband does so he is not even completely sure I should get the maternity leave (in Canada this can be split by the parents - don't worry, he will be convinced otherwise... unless he is willing to try out breast feeding).  But there is this constant worry that if I do find a job, the next job and then get pregnant right away that there will be a lack of trust from my employer and create a difficult work environment.

We also can't afford to wait... even a month without trying.  I'm just getting too old... :( sad face.

I read a "Dear Abby" style column a few weeks back where an expectant father who was hoping to be offered a permanent contract should inform his current employer of his intention to take the parental leave before a contract was offered.  The advice was he needed to come clean with the employer so as to not put the employer in a difficult position.

In my mind this is poor advice.  If no offer is made then he has put himself at a disadvantage unfairly, perhaps jeopardizing the job offer.  I think he should wait until the offer is made and then inform his employer.  If the employer then rescinds the offer surely that is grounds for discrimination?  But having said that is it much harder for a woman to hide the fact that she is expecting a child and it is much easier for an employer to terminate a woman who is within her 6 month probationary period because of noticeably protruding belly.  He can easily dream up any excuse, in fact he doesn't even need an excuse just that she didn't "fit in".

So the question is... do I start looking for work?  Knowing Hoping that I will be pregnant soon.  Knowing that we need the money to bring our dream to fruition.  Knowing if I am not working it can interfere with my maternity leave.  In Canada we get 17 weeks of maternal leave at 55% pay and then 35 weeks of parental leave which can be taken by either parent.  HOWEVER, it seems that this is contingent upon having worked a certain number of weeks since the last unemployment insurance claim.

My best and most hopeful dream is that they offer me a job here, and it is permanent... and sure... throw in covered infertility costs as part of my benefits package... it is still just a dream after all.

Money, Money, Money... it's a rich man's world

My husband and I never fight.... truly... never...  but tonight was a different story.  Money is of course foremost in our minds these days.  We have some debts of course... and they all stem to a single event. Our wedding.

Our wedding was beautiful.. complete with horse drawn carriage and a wedding by a pond.  But was this because I was a demanding diva from hell insisting on everything being perfect?  Uh.. not a chance.  I was pushing to elope but my husband needed a wedding.  See, he comes from a broken home, but not just a simple parents divorced kind of broken home... his mother left the communist country that they lived in and he didn't see or hear from her for a decade.

Finally, she sent for him.  He moved in.  She left again two weeks later leaving him with relatives in a country where he didn't speak the language.  A year later she sent for him again... this time to Canada.  His third country and third language in a year he moved to CAnada at the age of 13.  He didn't see or speak to his father for a decade.

My husband needed a white wedding, he needed his Norman Rockwell moment that was picture perfect and I needed to make that dream come true.  And we did.

We have different approaches to money.  Mine is a save now buy when we can afford it sort of approach while he believes very much that we can just put things on credit and pay them off one day.  So tonight it comes to a head.  I am insisting on living quite abstemiously and paying of our debt and starting to put money away for our fertility treatments in the months until we start.  My husband wants to go and buy things that aren't necessities.  Please, tell me we aren't the only ones who fight about money!

What goes well with stirrups?

Yep... .i'm nervous as hell right now.
Our appointment is today, at 1:30pm.
Gulp

Getting dressed this morning was weird. I decided on a tank top to make taking blood easy, under a jacket to keep warm and decided to go with blue jeans.  I don't really work in a blue jeans kind of place.  But I can go days without seeing any of my colleagues just because of what I do, and since i intentionally didn't schedule any meetings today I am sort of hanging out in my office.

I wanted to feel comfortable as I walked into the office today, or at least look like I felt comfortable, and blue jeans will do that for me i hope.  My husband is leaving work today at noon and we are meeting at home to travel there together.  It's a bit of a backtrack for him....  He works North of the city and we live East, but i didn't want to try to deal with two cars there, and i need him to hold my hand through today.

And I want to be able to analyze and discuss everything that is said to us in the appointment on the drive back home, not being trying to fight through both traffic and tears at the same time.  Anyone been through this already?  Help!!

Baby on Credit

If there is one thing that I knew about IVF before we started on this journey it was that this wasn't going to come cheap.  We still don't know exactly what this will cost us of course, we don't know what treatments we will need.  We don't know how many it will take before they are successful.  So, even though we can look up and see that our fertility clinic will cost us about $1,500 for an IUI that basically tells us nothing.

My husband and I decided to go to the bank yesterday to see how much money we could arrange before our appointment at the fertility clinic tomorrow (Gulp!).  I know the clinic offers financing, and no doubt they will pretty give you anything since they are filling a space in your soul and you know you will pay anything to have that baby you want so badly, but we also wanted to know, financially what our other options were.  Who knows if the clinic will give you the lowest rate?  Maybe it's like a credit card at 20% where you will be required to send all of your frozen embryos out to work just to pay it off.

The woman at the bank was ridiculously happy for us.  "Fertility treatments!  How exciting!"  My guess is she is baby crazy, but still confident that her nubile body will produce the children she is going to have one day... she doesn't understand that fertility treatments are filling me with dread and fear not excitement.  

She notices the title "Dr." attached to my file.  I hold a PhD and it has been put on my file as such.  But she mistakes it for an MD.  "I think we can get you a business loan.  It has a much lower interest rate."

There is nothing more ridiculous to me than the idea that our baby making be financed by a business loan.  This is not an investment that is going to be paid off any time soon. This is a long term investment that is going to require repeated infusions of cash as our child struggles to define themselves throughout childhood and adolescence.  Unless our child is the next Justin Bieber (and i really hope not after watching his latest string of petulant tweets) there is little hope that this baby is going to post a profit margin in the first quarter of his or her life.