You know you're a literacy professional when...

In 2009, my husband and I found out we were expecting our first child.  What a feeling!  We decided early on that we did not want to find out our baby's gender until delivery day.  For some expecting parents this may pose the following problem:  How will I be able to create the perfect nursery?  For me, the answer was simple.  The alphabet is gender neutral, right?  And what else would you expect from a literacy specialist anyway?  

So, we decided to keep the room green (before becoming the nursery, it was our office).  First, we painted big white polka dots on the wall.  We have really high ceilings in the bedrooms of our home so we needed scaffolding to reach the top.  (Thank goodness my dad is a contractor!)

After that, we selected letters and colors.  We decided not to put the letters in the order of the alphabet.  Instead we chose random letters and fonts.  Some uppercase, some lowercase...you get the point.  

Before we were even expecting, Luke and I had settled on our names. If our baby was a girl, we would name her Shealagh (pronounced Shay-la).  If our baby was a boy, we would name him Cameron.  About halfway through the design project, we decided to hide the baby names in the letters on the wall.  S-H-E-A for Shealagh and C-A-M for Cam.  See if you can find them in the picture below.  

If we were talking about this project during the summer of 2009, this would be the end of my story...but that would be kind of boring, don't you think?

Fast forward to the spring of 2010.  I'm happily sitting in my daughter's nursery rocking her to sleep, when I notice something about the letters of the two hidden names.  I do a double take, a triple take.  Then, I laugh to myself.  How could I not have noticed this?  I couldn't have planned it on purpose if I tried!  The letters in the names 'Shea' and 'Cam' spell the word 'schema'.  

Can't you just picture this on the cover of a future book that I might write?  I am so passionate about building student background knowledge and I've done quite a bit of professional reading on the schema theory.  It only makes sense that my first child's room would literally have this important literacy topic painted on her wall!

You know you're a literacy professional when your work invades your personal life, without even meaning to!  I guess it makes the point that I strive to profess in my work...literacy is vital and it's everywhere.  Even in babies nurseries!