Winter 2021 Updates
January 2021: Family beach portrait by Ellie. L-R: baby, Ellie, Mama, Dada
It’s the end of March and that means its time for a quarterly update, and what a quarter it’s been. Between work, life, the world, growing a human… all the things, I’m exhausted (and I’m sure you are too)!
What did winter bring for the Toddler on the Tenure Track household? Moving from the second to the third trimester of pregnancy, settling into our routine with Mike’s part-time position, adding a class to my teaching load (which is really 2 classes based on the number of students), and a lot more of the same from the fall. Things like walks around the neighborhood, endless Zoom meetings and appointments, calls with family/friends, and continuing to try and keep a 4 year old occupied during the times where Mike and I are both working. Winter has also been about trying to wind down any projects that I’m working on, knowing that I’ll be starting leave in the spring. The days feel long, the weeks feel short, and it feels like we’re living the same day, over and over again. I’m sure you can relate!
One very exciting thing to note (that will be exciting to no one else but us 😄), we tore up (and by we I mean Mike) the carpeting that was in our kitchen. It was lovingly glued to the linoleum flooring underneath it, so tearing it up involved pouring boiling water onto it, letting it soak through and then scraping/tearing up the soaking wet carpet/glue. Given the age of our house and when we believe the carpet was put down (1970s ish), we did have the glue tested for asbestos, which thankfully came back negative. Before baby gets here we’ll be putting marmoleum flooring overtop of the linoleum (and again by we, I mean Mike). Not sad to see the carpet go, though I will say it hid spills/stains quite nicely, ha.
Another super exciting thing for us is that Ellie has started reading!! She seemed interested so we went for it and it’s been a lot of fun to watch her brain at work. She’s been loving reading books to the baby (while I close my eyes). She gets practice and I get to rest, win, win. In addition to reading, we registered her for Kindergarten in the fall 😭… very surreal.
Moving on to a more detailed look at what I’ve been up to this winter… here’s a look at the various projects I did some work on this term.
research
Paper 2: This is the never-ending paper. My co-author and I talked about reframing the intro/conclusion sections to better align with the journal we originally planned to submit to, which she did. After lots of thought, I suggested we were trying to force the new framework onto something that didn’t really fit and that we’d be better off going with a different journal where we could submit it as is. Now it’s back in my hands. We’ve got a new journal picked out and I need to remove the previously added content (which should be easy). What I’m struggling with now is that if I submit it before baby, it will for sure come back to us while I’m on leave. And I honestly don’t feel like dealing with an R&R while on leave, so I may just wait until I’m back and submit it then. In my last update I mentioned I’d be happy if it was submitted before baby, and now of course it’s looking more and more like that won’t happen given data collection for another project that I mention below.
Systematic review: Other than doing a very short update/presentation of initial findings to some community stakeholders with my co-author, we haven’t done much with this in favor of focus group data collection and it will likely stay that way until I’m back from leave.
Focus group data collection: IRB submitted and approved. Focus groups are scheduled for April. We sent out an interest form and received 1,800+ people who were interested for about 30 spots!!! So we’re also trying to quickly turn some of the focus group questions into a short survey that people who don’t get selected can fill out. This has taken full priority, which is why the paper and systematic review have been stalled (not to mention lots of teaching). The plan is to get data collection done before baby and pick back up with analyses when I’m back from leave.
Book chapter: Like I mentioned last time, one of my collaborators submitted a book chapter that I’m second author on, in the fall. We received a few (very reasonable) revisions during the winter and got them resubmitted. This is one that I can actually cross off the list!
teaching
Seminar teaching and course prep: This is a year long seminar that goes along with student’s generalist year internships. A lot of it is discussion based, so there’s not a ton of prep involved (thank goodness). Though I do find it to be a lot more mentally/emotionally draining then my other courses. During fall and spring we do site visits to their internships, so I didn’t have coordinate those during winter, but I did start planning out my spring term visits towards the end of winter quarter. And of course there’s plenty of problem solving/troubleshooting and meetings when challenges come up, so even though I wasn’t having formal visits, I definitely had a number of things come up that happened in their absence. I also spent time prepping for spring term, figuring out what our schedule will look like with me going on leave and trying to schedule as many site visits as possible before mid-May!
Research methods teaching: I taught an online research methods course (like I do every winter). Though technically it’s one course, starting next year they’re giving online instructors credit for 2 courses because we can have almost double the number of students in our sections. They previously gave me some additional credits for this (though this year there seemed to be some confusion around exactly how many credits were warranted… though it all ended up working out because they dropped a course from my load for spring). I experimented with some new formatting for some of my assignments that I think I’ll continue to adjust for the next time I teach this. Overall, I feel pretty good about this particular course as it’s one of the ones I’ve taught the most.
Data analysis course prep: During spring term I’m teaching an online data analysis course (like I do every spring). Because baby is scheduled to come before the term ends, I did spend some time trying to ease the grading burden for the person who will be taking over the course from me (dropping an assignment and some activities). Because the turn around time between winter and spring terms is non-existent, I started prepping during winter term and then wrapped up during spring “break”, getting everything ready for the course to open (which happens the Friday of spring break).
Course revisions/other support: Myself and some others have been working on course revisions for our human development/generalist practice courses. So that has occupied some of my time. And then because I developed materials for and teach the research and data analysis courses online, I was asked to prepare resources for the instructors teaching the data analysis course remotely in the spring to ease some of their teaching burden. I will also add that both of these pieces came with some additional funds.
service + admin
Equity committee: Like last term, this involved attending a few virtual meetings. Start up for this committee is always slow as we often get new members each year and orienting/welcoming them to the work can take some time. Plus, the evening meeting time, which at times has overlapped with when I’m teaching, has caused some scheduling issues.
Parental leave: Met with HR again, once I had a better idea of what I wanted my leave to look like. Like I previously mentioned, I’ll be using sick time, short term disability (which I have been paying into as the main income earner), and the university’s sick leave donation bank, to support us during my leave, which will include a few weeks in spring (at a minimum, likely 4), and then pretty much all of fall term. Summer doesn’t count because I’m off contract.
Planning: Planning is happening every Friday afternoon for work and as my “morning” sickness calmed down a bit (or rather it got more manageable with meds), I settled back into my old routines, with everything I’m doing in Notion and blocked off in my google calendar. Still very much relying on my phone alarms for meeting reminders. Since I’ve continued to take a step back from blog work and a few other personal projects, I don’t have a ton of personal things that need the level of planning I was previously doing.
tenure
Official tenure review: Can’t believe that this one is showing up on my list! I made a plan for everything that needed to happen and blocked off time on my calendar each week to do these things (just an hour). I also thought long and hard about pausing my clock and made a definitive decision, which I’ll share with you in my next update 😉.
personal
Toddler on the Tenure Track: I got a number of posts up and am planning to probably have one more before baby comes. Then I will be taking a break for a bit!
plan(it)*: plan(it)* will be up and running before baby arrives (fingers crossed!). I'm making some course hosting changes, yet again, and am moving everything to Teachery. Stay tuned if you’re interested.
Meditation: In preparation for birth I’m doing Hypnobabies, which I’m counting as meditation since it involves over an hour of guided hypnosis sessions each day. It’s a lot and I think it’ll be super helpful during birth. So, once baby is here and I’m out of the initial newborn stage I’ll pick back up with my regular meditation practice, trying to work up to 30 minutes per day by the end of the year.
Health: Like I mentioned in my last update, pregnancy has led to a major slow down in my regular workouts (no lifting or bike workouts 😢). For the time being, I’m walking between 1-3 miles a day and doing Spinning Babies activities at least 4 times per week. That’s feeling good to me and my body right now. No gestational diabetes for me 🎉 and based on a growth ultrasound (which I realize are super unreliable) baby is looking very average, so it doesn’t sound like they’re thinking baby #2 will be almost 10 lbs like Ellie. We’ll see when baby gets here.
Budget: Still doing our weekly budgeting and still focused on savings vs. student loan payments for the time being, though we are planning to pay off Mike’s last high interest loan once payment pauses end in the fall. Nothing too exciting here.
That’s all for the winter. My next update will be at some point after baby comes!!