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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have a two year old son and I’m currently pregnant with a baby girl. We have a wonderful nanny who has been with us since my son was a baby, and she just announced that she’s pregnant with twins. We pay for her medical insurance and short term disability insurance to cover a paid maternity leave, but I’m concerned about accommodations during her pregnancy. Our toddler is very active and our nanny is constantly chasing after him - something she’ll have a much harder time doing as her pregnancy progresses. Our son is often sick, as is typical with kids that age, and she typically will still come into work unless it’s something serious. However, she has mentioned that she will feel less comfortable coming in when he’s sick now that she’s pregnant. This will create significant childcare gaps for us, especially as he’s about to start preschool and will likely be sick even more often. We provide 20 PTO days, but he is sick with mild colds, etc, much more often than that. Even if we can get her to agree to take extra days unpaid, we’re looking at significant extra costs to hire backup childcare.

Even more complicated is how to handle her return to work. I’ve been reading up on advice online about this situation and it just seems crazy to me. Frequent advice is to hire an additional nanny assistant to help her out, and to allow her to bring her babies to work with her. Frankly, if I was comfortable having my baby taken care of by someone watching two other newborns and a toddler, I would just put her in daycare at a third of the cost of what I’m currently paying for a nanny. A nanny assistant would help, and would make back up childcare much simpler, but would substantially increase the cost of our nanny to the point that it wouldn’t be worth it to us to continue with a nanny instead of daycare.  We already pay our nanny just over $100k/year (40/hr plus time and a half), and I’m balking at paying even more than that to find someone to help her do her job. To make things even more complicated, there is a live-in component to this job. We move out to our summer home for three months every year, and she lives with us during that time. Even if she agrees not to bring her babies to work during the regular year, she would have to bring them during the summer. I know it sounds churlish, but I don’t really want to live in a house with three newborns and a toddler. It’s not a mansion, and we would only have enough space for the additional children if we converted space that is currently used as our office. It’s also an extremely expensive town where she wouldn’t be able to find housing on her own.

Ideally, we would prefer to have her take her paid maternity leave with us then not return. However, she is determined to make this work because it would be difficult for her to find employment elsewhere with comparable pay and benefits. I think we legally can’t fire her or materially change her job duties (such as requiring her to take summer off unpaid so that we can find a summer nanny to move out with us) due to pregnancy, so we feel stuck. The only thing I can think of is to tell her that we’re not allowing her to bring her banned to work with her, including during the summer, and hopefully she will quit. What would you do? [/quote]

She is an at will employee and you can fire her in 
a heartbeat.  [/quote]

You could but it’s really shitty to do that. Some people have feelings. They are good people and don’t want to screw someone over. [/quote]

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