If it was official before, it's super official now — I'm on maternity leave. The school is closed this week for Thanksgiving, and Friday was my last day. But last night is when I got the magic papers — the incapacidad, which ensures I have the right to my days off and that I get paid for them.

As I've written, I've been going to the IMSS (Instituto Mexicano de Seguridad Social, a medical system for Mexico's workers), every month. In order to get maternity leave paid for, one makes a minimum of five monthly visits. Being the overachiever that I am (ha), I actually got in seven visits. At my visit about a month ago, the doctor was very specific about what day I should make my final appointment, which was yesterday. So, yesterday was the day!

Fortunately we were able to get an evening appointment and Fran went with me. I think I would have been fine without him, but we have seen that things seem to go better when he is with me. Also, I seem to encounter situations sometimes that I don't know how to tackle, and it helps to have my most trusted Mexican adviser with me. I did NOT want anything to go wrong with this super important appointment!

In the end, I didn't need to be rescued from any bad situations. We even arrived early enough to get our new IMSS cards, which will be required in the future. All we had to do was present about 50 documents proving that we are people, were born, have nationalities, home addresses and whatnot, and we got that out of the way. It was remarkably easy. Good omen!

For my appointment, I got the same doctor as last time — actually, the same woman who I had for my very first appointment. She didn't even take my blood pressure this time, just got right down to business. First, she gave me some papers and assigned me to a hospital in case I decided to have my baby through the IMSS system. Free, but not quite tempting enough. Then came the momentary excitement, where she looked at the date I had given for my last period, did some math and said, "Oh, you can't get your incapacidad yet, you're only at 32 weeks." "The HELL I AM!" I said. OK, that's what I thought. What I said was, "Nooooo, I'm at 34 weeks. My due date is January 2, and that is 6 weeks away." So she did some more arithmetic (on a piece of paper — guess pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to give away calculators and whatnot to IMSS docs) and finally agreed I was correct. PHEW. I started to sweat there for a second, imagining what they'd say at work when I showed up AFTER they had hired a temporary replacement and bid me farewell. Surprise!!

So, in the end, the doctor gave me my papers and stamped them, and then I had to take them to another office where someone else stamped them. In a few days, I have to take those papers to the bank and they will pay me 80% of my salary for 42 days, in one lump sum. THEN, I have to take the papers and the money to the payroll office at work, where they will pay me biweekly as normal, my full salary. That will last me through the birth (unless the baby's late, in which case I have to repeat the whole process weekly). And once the baby comes, I or someone else has to take the birth certificate and some other stuff to the IMSS clinic to get the second half of my maternity leave — the 42 days after the birth — taken care of.