Baby is coming…

In a mere 72 days, our family will increase in size 50%. The additional 50% will begin life somewhere around 8 lbs, and consume approximately the next 18 years of our lives.  I am so excited.

We’ve been working like mad to get the house ready for the new arrival – so far, 500 sq. feet of bamboo flooring is down, with just 225sq. feet left to go. The filthy old carpet has been removed, as well as the vintage linoleum tiles located underneath the carpet (no asbestos in the backing – phew!) We’ve received numerous hand-me-downs from our siblings and siblings-in-law, and have ordered a crib. We’ve decided on an unfinished Canadian made birch crib. With all the talk of the VOCs in paint, carpet, underlay, heck, pretty much everything, we’ve decided we’ll finish the crib with some sort of food-grade oil. With the carpet gone, and  low-VOC environmentally friendly bamboo on the floor, we should be doing our best to limit our new addition’s contact with all that is environmentally evil. We are going to do cloth diapers (there is some debate over this one, if you poke around the internet) but as we are inheriting most of the diapers, it seems foolish not to use them. Also, we use Pink Solution for laundry (and all our household cleaning), and it has no phosphates, which is one of the criticisms of the soap used to launder cloth diapers. We also have a high-efficiency front-loading washer, which should minimize the water used. We did buy some disposables, but they are compostable (whether or not our bin will be able to handle 8-10 of these a day for the first couple weeks until we can move to cloth is unknown.) And, yesterday while buying a water bottle to replace my sadly lost (and much dented) Klean Kanteen, we picked up two stainless steel sippy cups which, though we won’t need for some time, were half price. So, onward we move…after this (long) weekend, the flooring in the baby’s room should be done, and we can start getting that together.

At work, my job has changed somewhat, as I’ll be working half-time for the next ten weeks to coordinate the development of the learning model for the shared facility that will house the new school. The goal is to open the building (which will integrate many human services with the learning program of the school) in fall 2011, which seems like a long time away. However, we are hoping to be able to implement the grade 9 program next year, to iron out some kinks, and then implement grades 9 and 10 for the year following. The school will combine project-based learning with service learning and cognitive apprenticeships, and house around 400 students grades 9-12. It is very exciting to be a part of the program development – I have been so lucky in my career to continually land myself in really engaging teaching environments.

While many schools do project-based learning, or have apprenticeships, ours will be the first to fully integrate the learning into the daily operations of the facility, which will likely house a library, a food store, the community association, a health clinic, and a police station. It’s a great challenge to get all these partners to come to a common understanding, but there are some great, visionary people in leadership positions with the parties involved, and  they see the potential benefit to those in the community, and are willing to work through the difficult pieces.

In addition, I’m finishing up another masters class (just one class and a thesis left after this one!) It’ll be nice to be able to focus solely on my thesis proposal – however, I’ve been able to tailor almost all of my coursework thus far towards my area of research (project-based learning with “at-risk” youth), which is nice.

So, nothing dull about my home life, or my work life — who could ask for anything more?