Good news!

I know I've been shady in my recent posts about this potential job that's seemingly hovering somewhere in the ether. Well, no more! I found out just a short time ago that I've been hired to teach Childbirth Preparation classes with Lamaze of Ann Arbor! Yay! Of course, that doesn't mean that I'm going to start teaching next week; there's a bit of training involved, which I'll describe in a moment. But this works out really well for me and for us for several reasons:

1) It allows me to continue teaching.
2) The training and teaching will be in the evenings and on weekends, so we don't need to find child care for Maia.
3) It allows me to stay engaged with issues around childbirth in America--something I've really become passionate about.
4) It brings in some cash. Not much, mind you, but still. Plus, because the training is pretty extensive, I get paid for that too. That's certainly more than I can say about my teaching certificate! :)

I'm going to do my employment paperwork next week, and they'll talk to me then about when I start training. Basically, that involves a few things:

1) Observing a six-week class.
2) Observing two births (probably at U of M, since I had the birth experience at St. Joe's so recently myself).
3) Going on tours of the hospital birthing centers (probably, though, same as above--U of M, not St. Joe).
4) Doing a HUGE amount of reading. Gee, I'll hate that! :)
5) Preparing my class curriculum with supervision by my mentor.
6) Teaching a six-week class while being observed.
7) Eventually, after I've begun teaching, I'll get the international certification as a Lamaze Educator, which means I can teach this stuff anywhere in the world. That involves prepping for and taking an exam. But that's not immediate.

So, with all this, the training process takes 3-4 months, which means I'll probably be all finished by late summer.

I'm really excited about this, because I have very fond and recent memories of our wonderful teacher at Lamaze, and all she did for us. I believe so strongly in their philosophy that birth is NORMAL and NATURAL and should not automatically be treated like a medical event (because, in most cases, it isn't, any more than creating the baby was!). I've said before that I wouldn't change anything about our birth experience, and that's true. But, if I'm honest with myself, I'll admit that if I ever do this again, I'll use a midwife as my practitioner, rather than an O.B., because I believe that my own pregnancy and birth experience--while AWESOME!--was, from time to time, over-medicalized. I am proud of all the decisions we made along the way, but I also know that there are practitioners out there for whom some of these interventions would have been the last option, rather than one of the first.

So anyway, I have oodles more that I could say, but I shall not. I just wanted you all to know this good news. :) Later.