Fall 2020 Update
October 2020: Cannon Beach
Well, here we are in December and I’ve yet to do a monthly update. As a general practice, I’m always adapting and adjusting anything that feels like it’s not working and that has certainly been the name of the game this fall. With the nausea and exhaustion that pregnancy has brought me there was no way I was getting in monthly updates this term. There hasn’t been much extra room in my brain lately, so blog writing has taken a backseat. I’ll probably do another quarterly update at the end of winter term, but there certainly won’t be a spring term update since baby will be here before spring term is done!
What did fall bring for the Toddler on the Tenure Track household? A positive pregnancy test at the beginning of September, the start of my 5th year on the tenure track, lots of “morning” sickness for me (which we know does not just happen in the morning), a part-time remote position for Mike, some major adjustments to our new routine, a long weekend getaway to the coast (postponed from when things first shutdown), the year anniversary of my dad’s death, countless walks around our neighborhood, and so many Zoom meetings, appointments, and calls with family/friends. Even though we’ve been hanging at home life has felt quite full.
Moving onto a more detailed look at what I’ve been up to… here’s a look at the various projects I did some work on this term (more or less). Most of these projects I picked back up on from last spring and my last update, and there were a number of new things that I had to turn down given not feeling great and my availability in spring.
research
Paper 2: Finished up my part of this paper, now it’s sitting with my co-author who said we’d get it out by the end of the year but I’m pretty sure that’s not happening, ha! As long as it gets out before baby comes, I’ll be happy… though I’m trying to avoid an R&R while on leave.
Systematic review: I did a little bit of writing for this early on in the fall but it has since been paused in favor of focus group data collection.
Focus group data collection: Reworked the IRB application to make it completely virtual. IRB submission will happen any day now and the goal is to get interviews done before baby comes.
Book chapter: Submitted a book chapter with collaborators.
teaching
Seminar teaching/prep (fall): This is a year long seminar course that goes along with student’s generalist practice internships. Because a lot of it is discussion based, there’s not a ton of prep involved (thank goodness, because it was a new to me class). Part of the seminar also involves visits to their internship sites to check-in on how things are going (all virtual of course) and troubleshooting challenges as they come up. Because this was my first time leading this class I didn’t do a ton to make the syllabus my own and decided to save that for the next time I teach it.
Research methods course prep: During winter term I’m teaching an online research methods course (like I do every winter). Because I’ve taught it many times before the prep wasn’t too bad. I blocked off a few hours once or twice a week starting in early December and I was able to finish prepping in about 3 weeks. I did decide to change a few things to make grading less burdensome on my end and reduce some redundancy for students. I’m hoping that it eases the load (all around) a bit next term.
Seminar course prep (winter): I’m working on prepping for my winter seminar as December wraps up. Like I mentioned above for the fall seminar, I’m not doing much to change the syllabus I was given. Because the class is discussion based, there’s not a ton of prep needed on my end, it’s really more about students bringing in ideas and challenges from their internships and discussing them in class. My plan (for now) is to get this done before Christmas so I can completely take off the week between Christmas and New Years.
Lead instructor: Checked in with instructors teaching our human development course at the beginning of the term and then was available for additional check-ins throughout the term. I kept a relatively low profile here, providing support if asked but not necessarily doing much extra (because I didn’t have it in me!).
service + admin
Equity committee: This didn’t get started back up until the end of the term so this pretty much just involved attending a virtual meeting and talking about potential work for the upcoming year.
Parental leave: I met with HR to learn more about what my leave options are and we worked out that between sick time, short term disability (which I have been paying into as the main income earner), and the university’s sick leave donation bank, I should be able to take the end of spring term off (~4ish weeks) and all of fall. Summer doesn’t count because I’m off contract (I set aside summer salary during the school year so income will be covered during that time). This means that once I go on leave in spring I won’t have to be back until 2022 (which raises questions about tenure…)! Also, though my university will have paid parental leave in the future, they currently do not, so that’s why I’m using all my sick time up. I also shared my tentative leave plans with the admin team in my department.
Planning: Planning is still happening (mainly for work), though it doesn’t look the same as it did prior to “morning” sickness. I still have most of my main tasks and weekly dashboard organized in Notion. Sometimes I will block tasks off in my calendar, other times I’ll just decide in the moment what I want to work on. For little tasks (like remembering to send a very specific email or submitting a reimbursement form) I tend to put them directly in my calendar. I look at my calendar, but not nearly as much as I previously did. Definitely relying on my phone alarms for meeting reminders. Since I haven’t been doing as much blog related work and I’ve eased up on some other personal projects, I don’t have a ton of personal things that need the level of planning I was previously doing.
tenure
5th year annual review: This was due at the beginning of October. I followed my plan for getting this done in about an hour a week during August and September (thankfully I had most of it done before I started feeling super sick), which you can read about here and I managed to get it in a few days ahead of schedule! The committee sent me their (very positive) draft of the letter they’ll send to the dean in December. I had some questions around some vague language… was I supposed to actually do the two things they noted in the very last sentence of my letter before tenure - realizing that it’s less than a year a way and we’re in a pandemic? Or were they just friendly suggestions and I’d get a gold star if I did them but weren’t necessary for success (though of course they can’t guarantee that)? They adjusted the language somewhat and seemed to be leaning more towards my second interpretation. Now that I’ve got the go ahead to keep moving forward, now comes the question of what to do about tenure. Delay since I’ll be on leave? Have my doctor write a note saying that I can work on tenure submission during leave and turn it in? I’m not sure there’s an easy answer.
personal
Toddler on the Tenure Track: I got a number of posts up during the summer and early fall. Once all of my scheduled content ran out I stopped posting for a few months as I adjusted (and am still adjusting) to pregnant life. I have a few drafts in the works (and so many ideas) that I hope to get out before baby comes!
Meditation: Sigh… I was doing so well. I don’t know about you, but for me, attempting to meditate while nauseous just makes the feeling more intense, so I stopped doing it. I’ve only recently (like mid-December) started to get back into this practice, resetting to 10 minutes per day. I’m also using the fact that I’ll be giving birth in May as motivation to pick this back up as I think it can be a super helpful practice for labor.
Health: For the first 6 weeks of pregnancy I was exercising like normal, lifting, walks, biking (we splurged on a Rogue Echo bike)… and then it was all I could do to get out of bed. Right now, walks are my main form of movement, plus doing the daily Spinning Babies activities (every single person I’ve talked to about prepping for a VBAC has mentioned Spinning Babies). I’m not super consistent with either of these things. I do them when I feel good, but when I don’t, I don’t worry about it. I’ve had one ultrasound where I got to see the baby (and one that’s happening in the next few weeks). So far, all has looked good. In my pregnancy with Ellie I gained a lot of weight and she was almost 10 pounds, so they’re watching for gestational diabetes (which I did not have with Ellie). Because of some heart stuff they’re also recommending I get checked out by a cardiologist just to be sure all is good with my heart. This area of life has definitely been a struggle compared to pre-pregnancy, taking things one day at a time.
Budget: As I get ready to make my 2021 budget spreadsheet, it’s hard to believe we’ve been doing in-depth budgeting for 4 years. Having all that detailed information about our spending and income over the past few years has been really helpful in finetuning just how much we need each month (which will obviously change once baby #2 comes). Since our high interest student loan payments have been paused because of the pandemic we haven’t done much in that area. And with baby coming we’re focused on building up savings a bit more for all those unexpected bills 😒.
That’s all for this fall. My next update will be at some point in March of 2021!