The PRC offers free, comprehensive and fun baby care and childbirth classes. Our Expecting Miracles class series includes baby care, breastfeeding, birth recovery, labor and delivery. Our classes are incentive based. For every class a mom-to-be attends, she earns "Baby Bucks" which can be used in our Boutique to purchase maternity clothes, baby equipment, baby clothing, diapers and more.

Our classes are taught by trained childbirth educators, most of whom are certified or working towards their certification. Our classes are second to none in the area. We make the Expecting Miracles program available to both our pregnancy test clients and all pregnant women locally. They are absolutely free of charge, no income requirements, no application process, no sales pitch for products or services. We believe everyone deserves to attend these classes regardless of their finances!

Check out our website! www.expectingmiracles.com

2009 Program Report

Our Perinatal Education Department has had some big changes this year! Much has been driven by necessity and demand in the community. We are the only place in the Puget Sound region to offer a comprehensive childbirth education program, completely free of charge to the public. Expecting Miracles in on track to be the largest provider of childbirth education in Snohomish County by the end of 2010.

With the help of a free service called EventBrite.com we have streamlined our registration process for classes and reduced the time required to administer the program. Over the last year, we held 16 seven-week Birth and Baby Preparation series. 369 families registered and we had 2278 class visits (that is an increase of 36%)! We added another class night per week and are currently holding classes on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights. For the first time ever, we have capped registration and are fully booked until the New Year! We hosted two Baby Reunions with more than 40 families in attendance and our largest reunion of the year is planned for the end of this month.

In June we computerized our Baby Boutique tracking system and made all transactions digital. This has allowed us for the first time to track how much is spent by each client and what is given out to the community. Just in the last four months over 3,000 baby clothing items and 570 diaper/wipe/toiletry items were given away to our clients through the boutique! We also launched the new Exchange program which lets any woman in the community bring used baby items in and exchange them for Baby Bucks, allowing them to “shop” for items in their baby’s current size.

La Leche League of Everett (one of the world's premier breastfeeding support organizations) continues to hold their weekly support group meetings in our facility (usually a dozen moms & two dozen kids per meeting!); along with a new addition of the Attachment Parenting Group of Snohomish County meeting monthly in our classroom.