Day Care

We looked at an in home day care facility today.
So, really, we looked at someone's house. This nice young woman is a veterinary client of Kate's, and for all intents and purposes lives in a nursery school. Pretty much her entire house is devoted to the care, feeding, education, and amusement of small children.
There are, of course, wildly divergent views out there on the whole subject of daycare. We have friends that have their children in daycare five days a week, and friends that have entirely re-structured their professional lives to avoid daycare altogether. We are most likely going to be more the former than the later.
Neither of us are in a position to give up our careers, and I don't think either of us want to. I know I don't. Right now Kate doesn't intend to either. Of course, once EM is born, maybe we'll feel differently, and if that's the case we'll figure it out.

A digression on the subject of the baby's name.
Yes, I did just refer to the baby as "EM" for the first time here.
Let me explain...
A running game between Kate and I for years, whenever we'd come across some odd combination of names or an interesting word has been for me to say "If we ever did actually have a kid I think we should name it that." "That" is always something wildly improbable for the child of a white middle class recovering Catholic from Milwaukee and a white middle class Jew from Chicago. Something like Pablo, or Esmarelda, or Escutcheon, or Spitoon, or something like that. This joke originated from a family joke from our friend Jim Butler's family. Jim has three adopted brothers, and (as the story goes) while driving up to the family cabin in Northern Wisconsin prior to the adoption of the youngest, the other Butler kids were discussing what to name the impending arrival. As the debate was raging along on highway 51 northbound they passed the exit labeled "Mosinee Elderon". Jim evidently suggested naming the kid Mosinee Elderon. The kid ended up being named Peter. Arguably better, but not nearly as interesting. But the notion of naming a kid Mosinee Elderon is the origin of this game of mine and Kate's.
The fact is that we come from cultural backgrounds that have pretty contradictory naming traditions. Being in a successful marriage of any sort is quite a bit of work, being in a successful mixed marriage (I consider ours a mixed marriage) has it's own challenges on top of that. They're all absolutely surmountable challenges, but it takes work. One of the challenges that we're facing now is reconciling those contradictory naming traditions from our different backgrounds. Until we figure it out, and in a nod to this longtime game of ours, the working title of this child is Ecclesiastes Marimba (EM).
It's gender neutral, we Jews like to name kids after biblical figures (I know, it's not exactly a biblical figure, but it's biblical enough), and Kate's family is very musical. It is highly highly highly unlikely that Ecclesiastes Marimba is what is going to end up on the child's birth certificate, but it's working for now.

Anyhow, right now the plan is for EM to be in daycare after July of 2010. I'm not entirely comfortable with the whole in-home daycare thing, but the State has really cracked down on them from a licensing and regulation standpoint in the last few years. Kate knows this woman, she has good references and a lot of experience, and her rates, while certainly not cheap, are very competitive. We are very fortunate that we're in jobs that pay well enough that this is an option. A lot of folks in Madison have found it more economical to have one spouse give up their job to do full time child care. Not that that's a bad thing, it isn't, nor is it something that we can say we'd never do, but we're not planning on starting there, and we're grateful to have the capacity to choose. While the notion of in home daycare does make me a bit uncomfortable in general, in specific this particular home seems okay.
Not that I have any frame of reference by which to judge.
The fact is, according to the latest data, we're actually a bit late to be getting on a list for daycare in Madison. It's getting to the point where you have to apply for daycare on your third date in order to be certain of getting it before the child is ready for kindergarten, so all in all we're pretty lucky this worked out.
Now that we can check daycare off the list, I'm just beginning to become aware of all the stuff that we have no idea about that we have to figure out. Pediatrician and health care philosophy, wardrobe and diet, family bed or crib, last name, first name, whether or not to circumcise (leaning towards it), when to circumcise (no frickin idea), ect... There's a lot of stuff.
In my day job I manage a multi-million dollar budget and am responsible for things that can bring a Big-10 University to it's knees if they fail. Kate, of course, got into the University of Wisconsin Vet Med program on her first try, and amongst other things, performs surgery on people's beloved pets. We're both very intelligent, very educated, demonstrably competent people.

I'm reasonably confident that we'll work all this stuff out.
Or, we could be screwed.
Ultrasound tomorrow morning.