Job interview follow up

[Jupiterxo]

Long story short(ish), I had an interview at my dream hospital for their grad nurse program. There are 35 spots. She said it starts in October and I would find out by September 1st if I got a position. After my interview, I immediately sent a handwritten thank you card. Then a few days letter, I emailed both the interviewer and the recruiter asking if I could keep in touch. I actually included some questions for the recruiter that I didn't feel comfortable asking the interviewer, for fear it would be rude, such as "who is in charge of the hiring process?" The interviewer wrote back saying I absolutely could keep in touch but she would be on maternity leave in the next month so she won't have as much email access but will still answer any questions I have to the best of her ability.

Turns out, the recruiter forwarded my email with the questions to the interviewer, and she wrote back and took the time to answer all of my questions, also explaining that she was in charge of making the hiring selections and what the next steps would be. So she ended up responding to me not once but twice. Do you think that's a good sign? I don't know if I'm just being hopeful but I would think that if she wasn't interested then she wouldn't waste her time responding to me at all.

My actual question though is this...I plan on keeping in touch with her since September 1st is so far away and asking her two to three questions per email. My reasoning for wanting to keep in touch is so that she will remember me and also see that I want this position very bad and am persistent. I don't want to come across as annoying though. So, how often should I be emailing her before September 1st? Every 2 weeks? 3 weeks? A month?

I'm also secretly hoping that since she is going on Maternity leave sometime that she'll make a decision beforehand (unless you can work on maternity leave?) :)

[CrunchRN, ADN, RN]

Once a month.