Choosy Mothers Choose Takeout

There are reasons why Urban Mommies do not prepare seven-course meals for their families with any degree of regularity.

On Friday, the Metropolitans are having two other families over for New Year's Eve dinner and ancillary festivities. So, since Tuesday afternoon, I have been menu-planning, shopping, and preparing whatever dishes can be prepared ahead of time so that Friday evening itself will unfold as seamlessly as is possible in a world where three couples and three toddlers are scampering about one medium-sized apartment. (Incidentally, the two other families in question are the Divas and the van Wainwrights, so this whole illusion of seamlessness has already been shot to hell for the purpose of entertaining you, our gentle readers.)

Tuesday night, after the Metropolitoddler went to bed, I made hors d'oeuvre #1. Tonight, I made hors d'oeuvre #2. I have a little bone to pick with hors d'oeuvre #2. The recipe, from a highly touted brand-new cookbook, claims that the entire shebang takes 40 minutes: 20 minutes of "active preparation" and 20 minutes of baking. Of the 20 minutes of active prep, 8 of them are supposed to be spent sauteing, leaving me with 12 minutes to chop up (and finely chop, no less) six different ingredients, mix them up with some other (blessedly unchopped) ingredients, and stuff the whole thing into individual mushroom caps.

This 12 minute project took an hour and a half. And I haven't even baked the little buggers yet -- that 20 minutes constitutes part of the seamless Friday evening experience. (Now that I think about it, hors d'oeuvre #1 took twice as long as the recipe indicated, too. Hmph.) Who has time for this on a regular basis??

None of this is to say that I haven't had a pleasant couple of evenings in the kitchen. I happen to enjoy cooking quite a bit. I'm not saying that I should start a new career as chef de cuisine in some four-star Manhattan restaurant or anything, but it's fun to try out new recipes and I find the kitchen a soothing place to spend a few hours now and then. I'm just saying, is all.

My mother, Mrs. Suburban, likes to give me grief every so often about how I have all this fantastic cooking paraphernalia that I got as bridal shower gifts but rarely use. These are some of the occasions during which I inform my mother that she's lost her mind. Come on -- what with the full-time job and the toddler chasing and the attempting to get a little exercise occasionally (and, admittedly, the somewhat excessive amount of TV I watch -- but I TiVo it all, so I watch it in an efficient and commercial-free manner!) and the occasionally trying to spend a little time with Mr. Metropolitan or some of my friends -- what with all that, when exactly am I supposed to find the time to whip up gourmet meals to delight my husband's palate several evenings a week? (In fairness to Mrs. Suburban, she doesn't actually expect me to cook up these fabulous meals for Mr. Metropolitan with any frequency. Except for holiday meals, I don't think she's cooked dinner more than ten times in the last five years. She just likes to tease me about all my cooking equipment. Of which there is quite a lot.)

My mother-in-law, Mrs. Midwest, has her head on straight concerning this topic. She got us a new Foreman Grill (with all the new bells and whistles!) for Chanukah to replace our old outmoded one. I can whip up a tasty dinner of grilled steak/chicken/fish, microwave-steamed asparagus/broccoli/squash, and a salad in ten minutes or less -- that's the everyday cooking of the Urban Mommy! (All ingredients delivered to my door by FreshDirect, naturally.)

Not to mention the genius of Manhattan takeout. We here in the Metropolitan household are devotees of at least 15 different restaurants that are more than happy to deliver dinner to our apartment in half an hour or less: Upscale Chinese, quick Chinese, really quick sushi, somewhat-less-quick-but-higher-quality sushi, non-sushi Japanese, Indian, Upscale Mexican, Burritos (3 different places), Steaks, Middle Eastern, Diner, Upscale Pizza, Quick Pizza, bagels, and a few others I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Enough of this blogging nonsense. Who has time for it? I have 76 more hors d'oeuvres to prepare before Friday evening. Bon appetit!

Stiiiiiillllll Pregnant

I figured someone might think my lack of posting was because I had the kid. Nope. I'm here. 11 days to the due date.

My various friends with due dates near mine, however, have all become parents in 2004. The friend due Jan 2 with kid #2 I always assumed would go before me, and she did. The friend due a week after me had her daughter on Christmas. And the sister of a friend who was due on the same day as me experienced some health problems and was induced early, and mother and daughter are doing fine. All three had girls, so maybe my son just has a thing for older women and wanted to make sure they arrived before he did....

So at this point, I'm feeling really large. Everyone at the office wants to know what I'm still doing here, and I keep asking where else I should be! I feel fine, I'm getting stuff done at the office, and I'll feel better if I wrap up lots of loose ends before this kid arrives. The only real issue is the inability to get close to my desk, which makes typing uncomfortable.

All is ready at home - the to-do lists are finished, the baby's room is ready for an occupant (except for the furniture), and we've packed our bags.

The best news of all is that the mad itching, which seems to have been a common pregnancy ailment called PUPPP (said as "Pupps") has almost completely cleared up. The belly is now simply dry again, and the arms are no longer ragingly red and painful. I'm back to simply moisturizing, and it isn't keeping me up at night. The last two nights, I've actually gotten some decent sleep. (Not uninterrupted, just decent.) Whew.

Wishing all of our readers (I know you're out there!) a very happy New Year!

Happy Holidays from the Urban Mommies!

It probably would have been helpful to post holiday wishes sometime before the various winter holidays, but as a bunch of busy urban mommies, who has the time to think of these things and act on them in a timely fashion??

In any event, we wish all of our readers a most happy and fulfilling 2005.

Post Mortem

A couple of months ago, I wrote my inaugural Urban Mommies post, in which I alluded to my dissatisfaction with my current employment situation.

Over the course of this year, it became clear to me that my particular foray into the world of balancing full-time working with full-time mommying wasn't working. Which was a bummer of a realization, since I had honestly believed it could work back in my naive days as a new mother returning to work from maternity leave.

It didn't work for a number of reasons, some of which are my employer's fault and some of which are not.

It didn't work because I joined a new business (at my employer's behest) partway through the year -- a group in which (1) I didn't really know anyone, (2) everyone worked very long hours and lots of weekends, and (3) we had clients whose needs often dictated the schedule. Of these three factors, #1 was the most critical to the ultimate outcome. For my type of "special" hours arrangement to be successful, my colleagues had to be comfortable with it. And for them to be comfortable with it, they had to understand that my early departures didn't make me an unmotivated slacker -- it made me someone who worked somewhat different hours than they did and in a different setting (my living room) during the evenings.

When I left for maternity leave, I left a group of people who knew me, knew my work, and knew that I would always get the work done. When I came back from leave and subsequently moved into a new business, I joined a group of people who didn't know me, didn't know my work, and didn't realize that a general lack of availability for 6:30 or 7 pm conference calls wasn't an ominous sign of slackerdom. That, combined with the fact that my new role was substantially different from my old role and required a fair amount of getting up to speed before I really felt comfortable with what I was doing, pretty much doomed me.

So what could I have done differently? I suppose I could have fought the move. I could have asked to stay where I was, to keep doing a job that I already knew how to do. But I don’t think that would have been the right decision, and I honestly don’t think it would have made a difference. The opportunity to join the new group was a good one – it was an excellent chance to learn a new skill set and to get involved in a high-growth/high-profitability area of the company. What’s more, even the people in my old group didn’t know me that well, because so many people had quit both shortly before and during my maternity leave. So the group I returned to was a dramatically different one, and one in which people might have had the same complaint about my schedule. On the margins, they might have cut me a little more slack, but it wasn’t like I would have been working with people who’d known me for years and would give me the benefit of the doubt.

Alternatively, I could have made the decision to increase my face time for the first few months until I was so good at my new job that I could then reinstitute my leave-a-bit-early-hang-out-with-kid-until-bedtime-then-continue-working-from-home policy. This could have worked, but only under one condition. I’ll admit that I was not – and am not – willing to have my daughter’s weekday parental contact consist solely of the hour or so in the morning between when she gets up and her nanny arrives. So for me to have worked later at night, Mr. Metropolitan would’ve had to get home by 6:30 or so most nights to hang out with the Metropolitoddler until her bedtime.

But as I indicated in another post about a month ago, my husband’s work schedule has been insane for – well, a long time. And truthfully, it wouldn’t have been any fairer to him to only be able to work from 9-6 at a job that demands long hours, late nights, and lots of weekend time than it was for me to work from 9-5:30 every day while he was traveling. I know that if he’d had the choice, Mr. Metropolitan would have been more than willing to do it for a few months to make my job work out, but we really didn’t have any choice.

So the only way to prove my mettle to my new colleagues would have been to increase my nanny’s hours significantly so that both my husband and I could stay at work until later at night. Not acceptable. At no point during this entire work debacle have I ever once questioned my conviction that as a general matter, my daughter should see at least one parent in the morning and at least one parent during the evening.

Could I have worked even harder during the hours I was at work to transform myself into a Tasmanian Devil of efficiency – so impressively intense and efficient in the workplace that my absence for a couple of hours would have never have been questioned? This is a tough one. The answer is maybe. I will confess that I have never been the kind of person who puts her nose to the grindstone when she gets to work and doesn’t remove it until it’s time to go home. I am, however, the kind of person who always gets her work done correctly and on time. When mania is required to meet a goal, I can marshal an impressive amount of it, but when a more casual attitude will get the work done in a timely fashion, I am more than happy to get a cup of coffee or kibbitz at the proverbial water cooler or chitchat over email. That’s just me, and there’s probably nothing much to be done about it.

But here’s an interesting fact. Not everyone I work with has issues with my schedule. The people who don’t have a problem with it generally fall into two categories: (1) people who worked with me before my maternity leave (a dwindling bunch, to be sure) and (2) women. What do you make of that? It’s interesting, is it not, that women – married or single, mommies or not – were totally cool with the fact that if you want to have an evening call with me, it has to be after 8 pm.

And this is the part that in some ways bothers me most, because I can’t figure out a way in which it could have been avoided. The ultimate problems I have encountered stem from a workplace culture in which one’s heart and soul are supposed to belong to The Job 24/7. That culture came into existence at a time when men worked and women stayed home with the kids. And it’s not limited to my employer – it applies to most high-powered jobs with most high-powered companies and firms.

But that culture is not compatible with a world in which women work at jobs that are equally as high-octane as those of their husbands. The solution should not have to be that one or both parents must exit the race. The solution should be that everyone recognizes the value of spending a couple hours with their kids and that everyone who wants to can take the time to do that and that everyone should be cool with that, recognizing that the work will get done two hours later than it otherwise would have but it will still get done. Because that’s a culture that makes sense. Women – not all women, but a lot of women – seem to understand that. Men – not all men, but a lot of men – do not.

I can assess my particular situation with a fair amount of detachment these days, having had a few months to make my peace with it. But the broader issue continues to trouble me, because I’m not convinced that I’ll be able to overcome it even in a new workplace, even with Mr. Metropolitan picking up evenings for me until I’m settled in, even in a smaller environment where everyone has vowed that they understand the constraints of my schedule and that they’re totally fine with it. I’m just not sure that I won’t be writing another one of these posts in another year. I do, however, plan to use whatever lessons I've learned from this whole experience to try my best to make the balancing act work.

TMI - Sorry

Is there any remedy for ragingly itchy stretch marks? I don't care if the product minimizes their appearance, I just care that it will stop me from waking up several times a night due to having scratched my belly bloody. Currently I am Lubriderming 8-10 times a day, which has a temporary soothing effect, but no lasting one. Cocoa butter made it worse, and I'm not permitted to use hydrocortisone, as the steroids in it can apparently thin out my skin, making the problem worse.

Unfortunately, this problem seems to be spreading - my skin is drier (and thus painfully itchier) than it's ever been, despite regular moisturizing, sleeping with a humidifier, and drinking more water than I ever have. And I'm developing a weird rash on my inner forearms - at least I'm allowed to put hydrocortizone on that, which seems to be helping.

Any help would be appreciated. Sorry for having grossed you out, if I have. But I'm losing my mind here. This has been a remarkably easy pregnancy, but the itching is making me absolutely crazy.

All Snot, All the Time

I read somewhere at one point that the average baby gets eight colds before he or she turns two. My kid hit eight colds somewhere around the one year mark, and the snot just keeps on coming.

For the most part, it seems to bother me more than it does her. I just don't love the notion that snot is dripping all over her toys, clothes, furniture, and family. Call me crazy, but . . . ! I quiver in my boots to think of all the additional snot that I'll get to experience when/if the metropolitoddler heads off to preschool next year.

Other than purelling every square inch of my daughter's body every ten minutes or putting her into a bubble and never letting her encounter another human being, is there anything to be done to prevent some of these colds?

Prepping for Post-Partum Paranoia

OK, OK, so I'm a professional worrier. Quite good at it, too. Amusingly enough, one of my greatest fears is that having a kid will push me entirely over the edge into outright paranoia - I'm clearly going to be one of those parents who has the pediatrician on speed dial on every phone I have, and uses it until told that the doctor wants to refer me to a new peditrician so she can get some rest. Thank goodness for the tempering influence of Mr. Banana, or I'm pretty sure I'd get carted off to the loony bin pretty quick.

In any case, yesterday I got a little practice in this paranoia business. On Monday night, I noticed that Baby Banana wasn't moving around like he usually does. Generally, dinner makes him very active, and Monday night, nothing. So I had some dessert, which usually makes him move around enough to keep me awake, and was rewarded with only a few small movements. Those reassured me that it was likely temporary, and I figured I'd reassess in the morning. When breakfast yielded no movements, I called my doc. I was fully expecting to hear that this happens occasionally, and that I should monitor the movements all day and call the next day if no improvement. Instead, I got told to come straight to Labor and Delivery. Let's just say I did not enjoy the drive to the hospital.

Long story short, all is well. Baby Banana's heart beat is strong, he is moving up a storm, and I'm even having contractions. I just couldn't feel any of it. There seems to be no particular explanation, except that he likely is running out of room in there and the movements will now feel less like kicks and more like rolls. Sure enough, last night after dinner he rolled around a bunch, and this morning (as I type) he's doing it again. Whole lot of hoo-ha over nothing.

I do have to say that as panic situations go, this was one of the better ones I've had. Everything turned out fine and I got to listen to Baby Banana's heartbeat for over an hour while the monitored us. There are worse ways to pass the time. And I would much rather that I'm miserable from being panicky while he's fine than that I'm fine and he's not.

I suppose I've now learned that I can stay relatively calm in a perceived crisis regarding my baby, and was pleased to find that no one at triage pooh-poohed me for my nervousness. So maybe I'll get through the first few months of this kid's life without calling the pediatrician every twenty minutes.

Small Talk

I've noticed since I've been back from maternity leave (about a year now) that whenever I run into someone in the office who I haven't seen for a while, they always ask how my daughter's doing. Not "so, you busy these days?" or "what have you been working on?", which I seem to recall were the types of questions I was asked back before I was pregnant. (When I was visibly pregnant, of course everyone asked me how I was feeling/doing, but that's par for the course when you've got a beach ball sticking out of your tummy, n'est ce pas?)

I'm obviously happy to talk about the Metropolitoddler as a general matter of public policy, but I do wonder whether I've been pigeonholed as The Mommy rather than as The Colleague.

I can't imagine that guys are asked about their kids all the time the way I'm asked about mine. I don't ask guys -- or women -- in the office how their kids are doing, with the exception of a couple of people who had or whose wives had babies right around the same time I did. I find it a little weird that people who I wouldn't characterize as anything more than acquaintances go right to the personal question rather than sticking with more work-specific chitchat.

Has anyone else noticed anything like this? Do all women find themselves being asked about their children while the men are greeted with a more professional array of small talk options --or am I the sole Mama Madonna of Wall Street? Or does everyone get asked about their kids as a friendly gesture and I'm just being hypersensitive given my level of, well, hypersensitivity where my workplace is concerned?

(It bothers me to a certain extent that I, who have never ever ever been concerned with gender issues in the workplace, am now turning into the type of person I formerly rolled my eyes at. But that's a topic for another post.)

Drowning in Subscription Cards

Anyone want to suggest a good parenting magazine I should subscribe to? There's a dozen or more at my doc's office and I can't tell which one will be helpful to me once I actually have this kid... Or do I not need/want this at all?

Doctor, Doctor

Just came back from the doctor. One more two week follow-up, and then I'm on an every week basis, so we just went ahead and made the rest of my appointments. Very disturbing to make an appointment for AFTER my due date. I know, I know, I'm likely to be late, but still. You get that date in your head as the finish line and yet, there's still more doctor's visits! I did refuse to schedule one for the week after that - if the kid is still in there by then, I'm pulling it out with my trusty salad tongs.

Apparently, I misunderstood the kick count instructions - my Type-A self was doing three times a day, and she only wants twice, and she doesn't care about start and end times, only that he's kicking 8-10 times in the hours I count. A little easier to manage. So far, so good for both me and the baby - doc says everything looks good.

Now, if only we could find time to paint and get carpet for this kid's room!

Gifted Mermaid Magnet Schools

Apropos of Diva's preschool commentary this morning, I just found this Dave Barry column. The last paragraph is, as we here in Urban Mommyland like to say, something of a diet-coke-out-the-nose moment.

Five Things

Thanksgiving is a great holiday. No religious obligations, no foregoing of normally enjoyable foods, things, or pastimes, nothing. Just good food, time spent with family and/or friends, and reflecting on the things that make life wonderful.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that everyone who hangs out here in Urban Mommyland is thankful for their offspring (or offspring-to-be) and spouses. Here are five specific things that I am particularly thankful for this Thanksgiving.

• I'm thankful for my daughter's uncontrollable laugh when we play "drop the cap from the milk carton" and for her enthusiastic hugs and kisses.

• I'm thankful that I have the opportunity to watch her grow and develop and take on characteristics that so clearly derive from my husband's and my own personalities.

• I'm thankful for these undoubtedly fleeting days when I am the central person in her life.

• I'm thankful for a husband who considers me the central pillar of his life (a view that I suspect will be less fleeting than my daughter's!).

• I'm thankful for friends with whom I can laugh and talk and share stories about this interesting world in which we all find ourselves living (and I'm thankful for email, without which I would be able to spend much less time with said friends!).

What about you?

More Bizarre Baby Dreams

The baby dreams are getting stranger.

I don't recall all of it, but last night's dream involved me running around an airport trying to get someone to go to the parking garage and get my baby out of the trunk of my car, so that I could make my flight. Apparently my big concern was that I wouldn't get him in time to have him checked in as baggage.

You think I might be having some anxiety as to my preparedness to be a parent?

More Random Thoughts

- What did we do before baby carrots? Somehow they taste so much better than the carrot sticks that ended up in my lunch throughout my childhood. Did you know that they're just pared down carrots? Really - they are. So why do they taste better?

- The very same people who produce a large percentage of America's baby carrots also make the best thing I have discovered during my pregnancy. I don't get nearly enough fruits and veggies, and had a lot more trouble during my first trimester when they made me kinda sick (yes, more so than other things). Bolthouse Farms makes these smoothie drinks in a quart bottle (much more economical than the single serving sizes) and I'm completely addicted to the Strawberry Banana flavor. You must get these. Nothing but fruit, but so, so yummy, especially this time of year when any strawberries you find in the store cost $5 each and taste like cardboard. Makes getting my 5-a-day so much less painful.

- Mr. Banana finally showed signs of weakness the other night - he's actually concerned about getting his pre-baby to-do-list stuff done in time. True, his is very different than mine - mine involves making a drugstore run to stock up on diapers and Desitin just before the kid shows up and stenciling cute patterns on the kid's walls and the like. His involves painting two rooms, orchestrating carpet replacement for two rooms, redoing some electrical stuff in the bathroom, replacing molding and moving a lot of furniture. So I guess he's pretty reasonable. But I'll admit it actually made me feel a little better not to be the only one worried!

- My mom is coming this weekend. It's a very good thing. Odds are about 50-50 that she'll cry when she sees me in my large-belly state.

- It's getting more and more uncomfortable to sit at my desk. I like to sit up close and can't really do that any more.

- Two people have said something today about me waddling, yet two other people this week have seemed surprised when I've told them I'm pregnant (and one guessed I was about 4 months along when I told her). Do I look pregnant or don't I?

- Must resist buying everything on my own baby registry.

- On The West Wing episode this week, Leo makes several comments about being on Vicodin. The man is a recovering alcohol and pills addict - is there any way they'd let him have Vicodin?

- Are kick counts just another way to make pregnant women paranoid that something is wrong with their babies?

Attention All Internet Shoppers

So it looks like one of the keys to being an Urban Mommy is the all-critical reliance on internet shopping.

I myself have a whole spate of sites that happily take my money and send me constant streams of boxes with books, toys, clothing, and other essentials for the Metropolitoddler. And the daily emails from UrbanBaby and Daily Candy Kids provide constant inspiration as to other places to drop the Metropolitans' hard-earned cash. (Sign up for their email list if you aren't already on it!)

Clothing: Obviously, there's the old standby: BabyGap. (BabyGap online always seems to have a better selection than any of the individual stores, but that may just be because I live in Manhattan, home of teeny-tiny storefronts.) I also like Babystyle and Janie and Jack, particularly for really special outfits, with a soupcon of Old Navy thrown in. For baby sports attire, try Best Sports Apparel, which has all manner of sweet little baby sports jerseys, hats, socks, and dinnerware.

Toys: My new discovery is Baby Scholars, which has all sorts of great toys -- particularly of the more creative and less-battery-operated variety -- that I haven't seen on Babies R Us. Leapfrog and Fisher Price are good websites to get the lay of the land as to product offerings before zipping over to Babies R Us to make the purchase.

Miscellaneous: Personal Creations is a nice place to get those little personalized doodads that grandparents seem to love getting for birthdays and festive winter holidays from their new little angels. Poshtots is good for when you need a $19,000 Victorian playhouse for the backyard or a $15,000 lighthouse bedroom set. They actually do have some really cute reasonably priced artwork for kids' rooms. Little Folks is great for an array of baby accoutrements (but obviously compare prices with Babies R Us and the like if it's a fairly standard item). For a cute baby gift, Lilypad Baby does monogrammed blanket/bib/burp cloth sets in a variety of adorable and fun fabrics, and Kate's Paperie has gorgeous fabric-covered baby books and photo albums.

And it goes without saying that without my patronage, both Amazon and Barnes & Noble would go under tomorrow. I'm not as frequent a patron of Target and Walmart, but each has its place in my Toddler shopping milieu.

Where do you go to shop for your beloved offspring?

Somebody Come and Play

Fascinating article in the Chicago Tribune today about how pre-schools and kindergartens are increasingly about getting kids ready for first grade instead of focusing on that all important concept: play. Given our various pre-school conversations here, I thought it was worth posting. You can read it here. (alas, it requires registration, but it's free).

It got me thinking about fantasy play time with kids. The article talks a lot about Play-Doh, pretend kitchens and dolls - all of which were around when I was a kid, and (in some form) which were around for my grandmother's childhood (taking the concept of the pretend kitchen broadly into playing pretend with mom's kitchen stuff and extrapolating modeling clay for Play-doh). Is there anything new under the sun? Is fantasy play the same as it always was - playing house, playing doctor, making things out of clay, singing along with the Grease soundtrack and fighting over who gets to be Sandy and Rizzo and who gets stuck playing the boy parts?

Is there a toy for fantasy play (not educational play - obviously LeapFrog is miles ahead of Speak and Spell) that your kid has that wasn't around when we were kids that's better that what we had? Or even really different?

Options Options Options

For the past few months, Mr. Metropolitan's job has required him to travel a great deal -- usually three or four days per week. Most of it has been cross-country travel, which means that if he's got business on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he has to leave on Monday afternoon and arrives home at 7 am Friday morning, sleeps for a few hours and heads into work on Friday afternoon. Weekends aren't much better: usually he's able to hang out with me and the Toddler for half of a weekend day and spends the rest of the weekend's daylight hours in the office.

This is the kind of schedule that usually involves having a stay-at-home wife. The Husband is off working his manic schedule and the Wife is home cooking and cleaning and running the errands and caring for the Offspring. (And, of course, this is why so many men in the professional workplace don't really understand the challenges of working motherhood: their wives are home doing the stay-at-home mommy thing, so they don't see what's so difficult about working and having kids simultaneously.) But the full-time-work and full-time-mommy thing is challenging enough without also having a husband who's full-time-on-the-road.

In terms of actual blocks of time that Mr. Metropolitan is supposed to be covering, it doesn't look like much. His slot is supposed to be the 60-90 minutes in the morning after I leave for work and before the nanny arrives. But that means that either I arrive at work 60-90 minutes late, or else I split the difference with the nanny and get to work a mere 45-60 minutes late. Plus let's not forget that I already leave work earlier than everyone else in order to get home by the end of the nanny's shift. So basically, for the last month or two, I've been physically at my desk from about 9 am until 5:30 pm. Which, in the world of high-powered Manhattan professional life, frankly doesn't look so great. And, as we've seen, they don't even react so well when presented with a 7:30 am to 5:30 pm schedule.

Other than losing the ability to get to work on time, I also don't have any backup. "Hey, honey, something cropped up at work, can you go home to cover for me for an hour?" Or "hey, honey, I'd love to go meet a friend for a cup of coffee after work." Or even "hey, honey, I'm losing my mind a little today, can we order in a pizza and watch a movie together?" The answer to all three of these questions is no.

But what are the choices? Not so many, and they're not so enticing. Option One: get more help. I could hire someone to cover the early morning or evening slot on a daily basis. This is far from ideal, as it means that the Toddler ends up spending a grand total of maybe one hour a day with anyone who's related to her. I know people who manage their households like this. A woman I work with, whose husband has an equally high-powered job, has a weekday nanny, a weekend nanny, and a backup nanny who covers for Nannies #1 and #2 and doubles up on certain days. (Unsurprisingly, she's very highly regarded at work.) Why even bother having kids? As it is, I'm starting to hire weeknight babysitters about once a week so that I can attend a few of the many weeknight events that seem to pop up in November and December. That much I'm okay with, but not more.

So screw Option One. Let's look at Option Two: become a household with one working parent and one stay-home parent. Either I or Mr. Metropolitan could quit and stay home full-time. Two problems with Option Two. First, I'm not sure that our household finances could sustain the total loss of one person's income. I think we could manage it, but it would require a pretty substantial lifestyle change and would put a lot of pressure on the working Metropolitan -- whichever Metropolitan that might be -- to be Sole Bringer-Home of Bacon. And in any event, given that we're both decidedly underwhelmed by our jobs at the moment, this isn't a meaningful choice right now. Second, neither of us really wants to be a permanent stay-home parent. It might be fun for a few months, but I know I would need something else to occupy some of my time. (Remember that Visa commercial where the husband realizes that his stay-home wife has been reduced to speaking in babytalk 24/7 and has lost all sense of the adult world? He uses his Visa card to buy threatre tickets so they can have a romantic and intellectual evening sans kids and babytalk. They're watching the show, and the wife turns to the husband and says in a deep throaty voice: "Marvelous use of iambic pentameter . . . wameter." This summarizes the issue nicely.)

So this leaves us with Option Three. One or both of us could try to find some job that requires less of a time commitment, be it full-time or part-time. I'm not sure which jobs these are, exactly, but I assume they exist. Part-time isn't really an option for either of us in our current jobs. So I'd have to find a brand-new job on a part-time basis or else find some sort of lifestyle job that would cut my compensation by at least two-thirds but would be sufficiently personally fulfilling to make it worthwhile. I'm not averse to either of these possibilities, but (a) have no idea what they might be and (b) would have to strongly consider leaving New York to make that kind of pay cut work. Again -- no aversion, but no clue.

I guess there's also Option Four: persuade my parents or in-laws to move into the apartment next door. Believe me, if it comes to this, I have bigger problems than I thought I had.

I guess this is what it means when they say that women have more options these days then they ever had before!

Be careful what you wish for....

I spent the first 6 months of my pregnancy wanting to "feel pregnant." I'm now less than 60 days from my due date and boy do I feel pregnant. Today is a new milestone, however. My boy is kicking so much that I literally cannot concentrate on my work. Feels like the little guy is doing kick boxing in there!

Pregnancy is cool.

Passages

When Mr. Banana and I got married, there was one part about the whole experience that was bittersweet. My father passed away 9 years ago, and although he never would have been a huge part of planning my wedding or anything, the notion that I would be spending my life with a man who never met my dad was very odd to me. My parents are a huge part of who I am, as with most people, and the experience of losing my dad in my mid-twenties was extraordinarily formative for me. And the man who shares my life knows only what I (and others) have told him about my dad.

This is compounded, somehow, by the fact that I quite obviously married my father. Mr. Banana and Papa Banana have an extraordinary amount in common - they even look somewhat alike. Their personalities both tend toward the strong, silent type, they are both among the extraordinarily small group of men known as "Jewish guys who know which is the business end of a power tool," they are both meat-and-potatoes eaters, etc. etc.

And now I'm having a baby. A baby who will bear something similar to my dad's name, and who I will be wishing, under Jewish tradition, will be like my dad. This somehow seems terribly wrong. I should be naming my children for people who were very old when they died, who had opportunities to have their own grandchildren and even great-grandchildren, who lived long, long full lives. Not for my dad. No one should have to do that.

Of course, my father had to do it. I'm named for his dad, and my dad was the same age when he lost his dad that I was when I lost him. Vicious cycle.

There's a small (very small, thankfully) part of me that can't fully enjoy this coming baby because my dad won't be here to meet his first grandchild, and because my first born won't get to know the man he's named for except through stories and pictures. I certainly don't feel that I "knew" my grandfather at all. And some days it just makes me really, really sad.

The Rat Race Beginneth: Preschool Admissions

The Metropolitan family recently had its first preschool interview and lived to tell the tale.

By way of brief background for those of you who are not familiar with the Manhattan preschool process: remember applying to college? Imagine doing it when you're between one and two years old. That's the process. (I exaggerate only very slightly.) Here's some background reading: a New York Magazine story and a Washington Post story on the fun of preschool applications.

For us, the "where to apply" quandary wasn't much of a quandary at all. There are two factors: age and location. The Toddler's birthdate is such that she is only eligible for certain schools offering a "young twos" program. And we want the school to be within walking distance of our apartment, both for convenience of drop-offs and pick-ups and for ease of playdate scheduling. So between the young twos issue and the location-within-20-blocks-of-our-apartment issue, the schools pretty much selected themselves.

Now, of course, we need a school to select the Toddler!

Diva (who is also going through this process) and I have discussed this at some length, and have concluded the following. Let's say that 10% of all toddlers are wildly unmanageable or otherwise unadmittable. And let's also say that 10% of all parents are deeply unlikeable or otherwise unsuitable for the social circle that is that school's Parents Association. Even if you assume that those two groups are mutually exclusive (that is, that the unadmittable toddlers don't belong to the unlikeable parents), that still leaves you with 80% of the applicant population that is perfectly acceptable.

So how exactly are these preschools distinguishing between my perfectly acceptable Toddler and any of the other 80% of perfectly acceptable Toddlers? Beats me. At the end of the day, I have to take it on faith that some school will find all three members of the Metropolitan family to be exactly what they're looking for, and that we will find that school to be similarly perfect for us.

As for the interview itself, the Toddler presented herself as well as we could have hoped for. She was poised, friendly, independent-minded, cheerful, curious, and inquisitive. Oh, and really darned cute, too. I have no ability to gauge how well Mr. Metropolitan and I did, except to say that I think we were at least reasonably likeable. But if the Toddler gets dinged, she can always blame Mommy and Daddy.

One Track Mind

I've turned into those people I hate. Everything is about the kid. Always. I don't want it to be this way. I'm an intelligent woman with things to say on topics of importance, but the only thing anyone ever asks me is "How are you feeling?" And for seven months, I've been good - I've answered "fine" and tried to change the subject to anything of interest to the other person, especially if that person doesn't have kids.

But this weekend, it somehow became all about the kid. I couldn't manage to hold a conversation without it turning to my pregnancy. I thought about it constantly, and talked about it constantly. I'm playing the pregnancy card with Mr. Banana regularly and getting out of housework or climbing to get things in the kitchen - even to get out of chopping an onion, which I find completely intolerable in my 3rd trimester. And I went to an event this weekend where things were happening that I was completely interested in and spent the entire time I was there talking with a friend who is due shortly after I am about which crib furniture we ordered.

I don't know how this happened, and I don't know how to make it stop.

On a lighter note, the bathroom floor is progressing nicely (and my precious toilet should be back in place by the end of the week), The Incredibles was fantastic, all the eBay baby clothes have been washed and put away without losing a single sock or mitten, and I'm still having a remarkably easy pregnancy. Plus, I get to have another ultrasound next week! Yay!

There's a Land That I See....

Listening to LaunchCast today, the wonderful Carole King Really Rosie CD came on. Always been a favorite album of mine, long after I wore out my LP as a kid (had the Sendak books, too!). Got me thinking about kids music. I've already collected up all my kid-oriented CDs to put in the bambino's room, but I know there are other good ones out there that I should know about.

I have: Free to Be You and Me, Really Rosie, all the Animaniacs CDs, two Trout Fishing in America CDs, the soundtrack to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, Sesame Street 25th Anniversary CD, the entire Schoolhouse Rock oeuvre, and probably a few other things.

I know I need: They Might Be Giants kids CD, and a bunch of stuff by Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer.

What else do your kids like? What do they like as toddlers and what did they like as babies? I'm not looking for standard kids sappy crap that isn't decent music - I'm looking for stuff that they'll you like listening to as adults as well. Good, fun stuff, or stuff to put them to bed with that isn't going to drive me crazy.

Because if you don't give me some ideas, Mr. Banana is going to sneak in the kid's room and play him a steady diet of 70s classic rock.

Doormat or Despot?

Feeling a little aggravated and thought I'd share with the class.

Earlier this week, Leta the Nanny asked me if she could take off a couple hours early on a particular day next week to go to an evening class she was interested in attending. Leta is all about self-betterment, and as best I can tell, has an array of various workshops and classes that she goes to during her free time. I checked my calendar, and it's actually not a terribly convenient day -- I have an evening doctor's appointment that day, and Mr. Metropolitan may have to travel that day as well. But I said I'd check with Mr. Metropolitan and let her know.

The next morning Leta called to tell me she had the flu and wouldn't be coming in. Other than the emergency childcare crisis this precipitated, I had no problem with her absence. I am all in favor of nannies staying home when they're sick. The last thing I want is for Leta to pollute the Toddler with whatever's ailing her. All that being said, it was an inconvenience for me as well as the Grandmother.

So I called Leta tonight to see if she was feeling better and to check that she'd be on time tomorrow morning. She said she was much better and would be in on time. And then she asked me again whether she could take off two hours early for her workshop next week. I deferred the question until tomorrow, saying that I hadn't had a chance to discuss it with Mr. Metropolitan yet, but I have to admit that I was a little pissed off that not only did I have to scramble to find someone to mind the Toddler this week, but now, unless it turns out that Mr. M won't be leaving for his trip until the following morning, I have to either reschedule my doctor's appointment (and leave work early to boot) so that Leta can make it to her class, or else tell Leta that she can't go and end up looking like an evil dictatorial meanie of a mommy.

Doesn't logic dictate that if you miss a few days of work one week, you perhaps decide not to press the issue of whether you can take off early for a non-emergency event the next week? Isn't something here not quite right?

Deep Thoughts, or at least Random Ones

- The Incredibles is getting great reviews. I already have my tickets for tomorrow night. I'm very excited to have a kid so that my passion for kids music, kids movies and kids books will no longer seem odd to my friends and family.

- My crib linens, along with the requisite cute matching accessories, have arrived. I have bought Dreft (Mr. Banana: "Isn't that just Perfume Free Tide with a higher price tag?" Lola Banana: "Shut up, I'm nesting.") and washed said linens. I have also washed the various baby items I have purchased on eBay. I'm feeling more ready. Mr. Banana thinks I'm crazy. He's likely correct.

- My baby's heartbeat is my favorite sound in the world. I cry every time I hear it, as I did at my appointment on Tuesday. The relief it gives me that all is well makes me irrationally happy.

- Am contemplating the issue of banking cord blood. Several of my friends have done it, but all have had some reason (getting it for free, history of nasty diseases in the family) that override the main issues here - high cost with low potential usefulness. All thoughts on the subject welcome.

- Mr. Banana is currently working on our latest condo-improvement project - ripping out our bathroom floor (which was hideous and in disrepair due to a hundred years of bad maintenance and boneheaded decisions by previous owners) and replacing it with nice new tile AND a radiant floor heating system! I'm very excited. My entire home is filled with concrete dust, but I'm thrilled that my husband knows how to do this, that he enjoys it, and that I'll be getting such a lovely bathroom out of the deal. There's only one drawback - this bathroom is the one right next to our bedroom, and it's off limits for a few weeks. This 31 weeks pregnant woman now has to go all the way to the other end of the house in the middle of the night, often several times, to pee. So far, it's totally worth it. But I'm very, very glad that once Mr. Banana starts a project, he works furiously until he completes it.

- Baby socks are cute, but how the heck to do you keep from losing them in the laundry?

Ubermommy

It seems to me that even in the most egalitarian of two-working-parent households, it still falls to one parent to be the Manager of the Household. It's just more efficient, insofar as there's one person who is the repository of all procedural knowledge. And at least in my household, that Manager is Mommy.

Efficient though this system may be from a management perspective, it can be both exhausting and deeply time consuming for She Who Manages. See, for example, Diva's recitation of the events of her morning a couple of days ago. I go through that sort of thing at least once or twice a week, where an entire half day is entirely consumed by a variety of phone and Internet-based errands.

This week's particularly complicated and time-consuming crisis involved the arranging of substitute child care due to a sick nanny. Even after the child care was arranged, the complications -- only somewhat abated -- continued. Why? No one knows the System the way I know the System. So even though the Grandmother, who is both very capable and very enamoured of the Toddler, is substituting in for Leta this week, I still ended up being late for work today so that I could help the Grandmother out with the assorted shenanigans that are part of the Toddler's morning routine these days. The grandmother wanted to take the Toddler out for breakfast, but of course had no idea where the bibs, sippy cups, baby forks, and other restaurant distractions were located. And she decided to put the Toddler into the stroller while looking around for these various restaurant necessities. Seems logical, except that any full-time Metropolitan Household Manager knows that the Toddler hates sitting in the stroller by herself when it's not moving, so I had to rescue a very upset Toddler as well as finding all of the assorted paraphernalia for the Grandmother. And so on. It takes a long, long time to get out of the house in the morning when I have to get not only myself ready for the day, but also the Toddler and the Grandmother. (And let's not even get into the lectures I had to contend with in the midst of all this about how I should revise the System so that it more resembles the Grandmother's idea of what the System should look like.)

Mr. Metropolitan happens to be traveling on business this week, so that complicates matters a bit further, but even Mr. Metropolitan doesn't completely understand the System. He is very helpful and useful when presented with a particular task, but at the end of the day, he's not the Manager.

Looking back over this post, it seems to me that an obvious response would be: "Why not give up on the whole notion of a System and just let the chips falls where they may?" There are a couple of answers. First: is it not clear that the Urban Mommies are all Type A control freaks? Second: as I led off by saying, all households have a manager. And at least in my experience, that manager tends to be the wife, regardless of how busy she is in her non-household career. But when you add a third person -- a person in diapers -- to the husband-and-wife relationship, the number of household tasks increases exponentially, and the only way to get anything accomplished is to have a System.

I guess I could outsource the whole thing and hire a true household manager, but (a) it's not clear to me that I could afford such a luxurious concept, and (b) come on, where's the fun in that?

A Banana By Any Other Name

"So, I read your blog today," says Mr. Banana after our pre-natal class last night.

"And?" I said, nervously.

"Cute," he says, "but this Mr. Banana thing? I don't know. Sounds a little obscene, doesn't it?"

Well, dear readers, does it? And if so (and if obscene is a bad thing) how should I refer to my darling husband?

Humpty Dumpty? I Don't Think So.

Went to a Halloween party this weekend. Since I have about 5 clothing items that fit me at all, I figured I was exempt from wearing a costume. I mean, really. Can there be such a thing as a maternity Halloween costume?

Apparently yes.

In Loco Asparagus

The three most important people in my daughter's life are Mommy, Daddy, and the nanny.

During any given week, the kidlet spends more time with her nanny, who we'll call Leta, than she does with either parent. I used to find this a little troubling -- we went through a phase where the kidlet would run into Leta's arms immediately upon her arrival in the morning, showing no further interest in either mommy or daddy. Same thing when I got home in the evening: I'd get a rather perfunctory smooch hello, and then she'd return to whatever game she was playing with Leta. Leta would do a little cajoling to get the kidlet to give Mommy a little more affection -- which always made me feel worse than the initial lack of enthusiasm. But I'm pleased to announce that the all-Leta-all-the-time stage has passed, and Mommy is ascendant! (I figure I have maybe another year until Daddy overtakes me as my daughter's true love, so I'm trying to relish my fleeting role as Favorite Parent as fully as possible.)

Now that my natural place in the universe has been restored, I have returned to my usual level of satisfaction with how the nannying arrangement is working out. Leta is very sweet and gentle, adores the kidlet, and enjoys telling me all the stories about what they did that day. A friend actually asked me today whether I'd quit my job without telling her, because I'd relayed a number of playdate stories in such detail that she assumed I must have been there.

I of course have a few gripes here and there, but they're relatively minor in the grand scheme of things. Leta isn't particularly creative on either the dressing or the feeding of my daughter. She rotates the same several outfits over and over rather than digging down a little deeper in the drawer to put on the fifteen other outfits that lurk beneath the favored few. And I could stock a refrigerator full of interesting things to tempt the little one's palate, but unless I explain each particular item, Leta is extremely unlikely to come up with any innovative new lunch for her. She is kind of a wuss about walking in the rain, and so the kidlet tends to skip her little toddler gym and music classes on days when it's raining. But really, these quirks are far from catastrophic. At the end of the day, she loves my kid, is sweet and kind to her, and lets me share in the fun of their day. The quirks are just quirks -- and I'm sure that as a caregiver, I myself have quirks aplenty. So I'll happily remind Leta for the eighth time that there's asparagus in the fridge, so long as I know my daughter is getting the love she deserves.

Everything I Need

As of today, I have everything I am required by law to possess in order to bring my newborn home from the hospital. I possess both a car seat and a digital camera. Thanks future-grandma and future-grandpa for my early Chanukah gift!

Sweet Dreams Are SO Not Made of This

Like every other expectant mother (so I've been told), I've had the baby dreams. In the first few months, they all involved horrible things happening to the baby, either in the womb or afterwards. After a while, some of them got to be pretty sweet - I dreamed about playing with my baby in the park, my baby growing up and going to school. But now, I'm having nightmares - honest-to-goodness, sit-bolt-upright-in-bed, cold-sweat nightmares - about CRIB LINENS.

I have picked out the nursery furniture but have not yet chosen crib linens. I've been all over the web for a few days now, and have narrowed it down, and am merely waiting for swatches to make my decision. This will all be done by the beginning of next week - they'll be chosen and ordered, I'll order some cute accessories, and we've decided we'll do things like paint and get new carpet in December. This particular checklist is one I actually feel good about.

Apparently, my subconscious feels otherwise.

Mr. Banana will see this as a vast improvement. During the first trimester, I woke up in a cold sweat one night yelling that I was a terrible mother because I'd forgotten to teach my child its own phone number. Somehow, he will see nightmares over crib linens as more manageable.

The Shopaholic has a Baby

It's official. I've gone nuts.

So my family/ethnic group has this superstition about not bringing anything into the house for the baby before the baby is born. Not unusual, right? Except I'm having a really hard time with it. I've never had a kid before, and the last thing I want is to have it home for a few days and realize at 3am that there's stuff this kid needs that I DON'T HAVE. I'm a planner. There should be notebooks and checklists at work here. I should be comparison shopping, finding deals, laying in enough supplies for quintuplets. But I'm not supposed to buy anything yet. Irresistible force meets immovable object.

Enter the Type-A Queen of Rationalization.

Rationalization #1. Ordering Things is Not Buying Things. Nursery furniture has to be ordered 12 weeks in advance to ensure it can arrive anywhere near around the time that the kid arrives. So it's been ordered, and the good people at the store will hold it until the kid arrives. I will call them from the hospital, my mother or mother-in-law will let them in, they will set it up, and I will come home with the child to a set-up room. Amen. Not much of a rationalization there - nothing is actually being brought home until the kid is.

Rationalization #2 - Planning Is Not Purchasing. I can make all the checklists and spreadsheets I want. I can register, so long as I don't let anyone buy anything on the registry yet. I can research products, brands and such all I like. I can visit Consumer Reports on-line as often as I want. And I can certainly own and cart around that great bible of expectant mothers everywhere - Baby Bargains - and take notes in it until the pages fall apart.

Rationalization #3 - Used Things/Borrowed Things Have Not Been "Purchased For the Baby." So the hand-me-downs from my cousin don't count. The things I've borrowed from local friends don't count. And the stuff I've bought on eBay obsessively for the last week doesn't count. None of this was *originally* purchased for my child, so it doesn't count. Right? Right?

Rationalization #4 - If I Have to Have It BEFORE the Kid Comes Home, I Can Buy It Now. I had to buy a carseat. They won't let me bring the kid home without it. I probably didn't have to have it 3 months in advance, but do I really want to be at Babies R Us when I'm 9 months pregnant? Of course not.

Rationalization #5 - My Office is Not My Home. If I buy stuff for the kid, I can keep it in my office until the kid arrives without running afoul of the rule. See also Rationalization #5A - My In-Laws' House is Not My Home.

Rationalization #6 (this is the big one) - The Closet in The-Bedroom-That-Will-Be-The-Nursery is Not Actually Part of My House. Take the big leap of faith with me here. I have officially declared this particular closet to be its own sovereign nation, with its own ruler, parliament, and plat of subdivision. Anything in this closet, therefore, is not in my home. After the baby is born, I will use my omnipotent powers to immediately annex the closet, anything that's in it, and its tax base, back into my home.

In other words, superstition be damned. I'm not losing any more sleep over not being prepared for this child! But I'm not going to spit into the wind either. May the gods of fate not strike me down for being obsessive and pregnant.

Making the Most of the Minutes

One of the things that's often mentioned as a benefit of being a working mother is that you don't get sick of your kid(s) the way stay-at-home moms apparently do upon occasion. It makes sense, I guess -- if you're doing something all day, every day, it's going to wear on you at a certain point, no matter how cute and talented the something is. But as a working mommy, the time I spend with my offspring is both limited and precious. And so there's the desire to make the minutes count, which in turn leads to a real sense that the time I'm spending with Toddler Metropolitan is of a high quality.

My own mother didn't work during my childhood, and I think it would have benefited her to do so. Not only would it have been helpful in keeping her nose out of every iota of my business (which is another issue entirely), but I think she would have been much happier during the time she was spending with me and my sibling. I remember a lot of hassling and aggravating and not a lot of time spent just hanging out and enjoying each other's company -- because, frankly, we didn't find each other's company terribly enjoyable. I keep my mental fingers crossed regularly that my relationship with my daughter will not develop along those lines. And I suspect and hope that having my own life outside the home will help to keep our relationship vibrant and loving even when I am no longer the epicenter of my daughter's world. (Sniffle.)

So when I feel inclined to complain about my work situation -- which these days is quite often -- I am acutely aware that it's not the fact of being employed that's bothering me, but rather the circumstances of my particular employment situation. The goal is to find a way to be happy and content in both my professional and my personal life, not to entirely sacrifice the former for the latter.

A Rose By Any Other Name....

So now that I've seduced you all with Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing... this is merely upping my stress about naming my child.

You see, I hate my name. Always have hated my name. Suffice it to say that if Lola Banana were my real name, I'd hate it less. It's unattractive, hard to spell, long, and completely out of sync with the names in my generation. So now I'm left paralyzed in naming my own child. Something too common? Something too unique? Something with a crappy nickname we hope never gets used? The stress is killing me. Add that to the restrictive naming conventions of my particular ethnic group and you have a nightmare. My child is doomed to be Baby Boy Banana for a long time to come.

I've done all the right things - I've read at least 7 baby books cover to cover. I've called names loudly down the hall to see how they sound. I've consulted with friends, relatives and random strangers. I've trolled the Net. And I've still got nothing.

How do you name a kid in this day and age without setting either you or them up for therapy?

Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing

If anyone out there is reading this before giving birth, you have to visit my favorite baby name site, Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing.

We're having naming issues, but at least we're not naming our kid Oleo.

The Downside of Equality

I have a number of friends who are stay at home moms, and a few who are (or are about to become) stay at home dads. The idea has a certain amount of appeal to me, and also to my husband, who would love to be a stay at home dad. But there's an inherent problem here:

My husband and I have nearly identical salaries.

It's something I never thought about. All the couples I know where one parent stays at home fall into one of two categories: (1) one parent makes more than twice what the other parent does, and the other parent makes little enough that it won't even cover the cost of day care, or (2) one parent makes such a good amount of money that even the loss of the second income, no matter how decent that second income, isn't felt enough to make it worthwhile to have the second parent keep working if they prefer to stay home. Neither is true for us. One of us staying home full time means losing half our income, and we both have chosen "lifestyle" jobs in otherwise rat-race-ish professions so that we get a chance to see each other and future offspring once in a while, so while we're certainly not poor, neither income on its own would allow us to live the way we want to live, nor in our current apartment.

So we're left considering daycare or a nanny, both of which are pretty pricey for people in our income range. I find myself wishing that my husband and I weren't so economically equal, so that one of us staying home were more of a viable option. Not what I thought I'd be wishing for.

Thank goodness I'm not the only one I know in this position - one option we're looking into is a nanny share with some local friends that may work out for the best for all four Urban Mommies and Daddies.

Shoes Without Guilt: A Benefit of Working Mommyhood

A stay-at-home mommy I know was telling me recently that she's kicking around getting a job because her husband the breadwinner has been exercising an iron-clad grip over the family pursestrings.

It's an interesting situation. Her earning potential isn't terribly high, and she and her husband decided early on that it made sense for her to stay home with the new baby because, among other reasons, her salary wouldn't be much more than the cost of a full-time nanny. Her husband -- who makes quite a healthy living by any standard -- was always the manager of the family finances, but now that he's the only one bringing home the proverbial bacon, he's apparently gotten quite strict about what she can spend. He literally doles out a weekly cash allowance, reviews every item on her credit card bill and quizzes her about it, and shares very little information about what he's earning or what he's doing with the earnings.

This situation sounds more than a little excessive to me, and I suspect that there's more going on here than meets the naked eye. But I do get the feeling that a significant percentage of stay-at-home mommies need to report their spending habits to their bacon-bringing spouses to at least a certain degree.

That's one thing that can be said for being a working mommy. With gainful employment comes the freedom to buy (several pairs of) shoes on a whim, should I feel so inclined. I don't feel any particular need to rationalize what I spend. We do have melded bank accounts and credit cards, so my husband certainly has the information he needs to offer his views on my spending habits (which he does). But there's a measure of freedom associated with being a working mother -- when I feel a bit fenced in by my harried schedule of work and toddler and errands and and and and, it's nice to know that I can always go buy some shoes with impunity.

Personal Space

Certainly this is not unique to Urban Mommies, but it's new to me, and this is, after all, a place to post such things....

I cannot figure out which is worse - the people who just touch my (now visibly) pregnant belly without any regard to whether I might want them to, or the people who ask if they can touch my belly and then pout when I say no. In what world does ANYONE want people - whether strangers or friends - touching their belly? And why would I want this MORE when my belly feels distended, itchy and uncomfortable?

Things I Thought I Knew

Even before Mr. Metropolitan and I decided that we were ready to propagate, we made a number of decisions on eventual-offspring-related grounds. Back a few years ago, I switched jobs in significant part because the new job would be more family-friendly than the prior one. Family-friendliness wasn't mission-critical to me at the time -- we were a hard-working professional couple and planned to remain so for quite some time -- but I knew that somewhere along the line, I'd care about my hours and would want the kind of job that had a clearly defined start and end to the day, wouldn't require me to travel as often, and that wouldn't tie up my weekends. And it even paid better. No brainer, right? So off I went, with full spousal encouragement, to start over with a brand new job and a brand new career.

The theory had been to work on getting me knocked up starting about a year after my move to the new job. But shortly before we were to get rolling, one of my managers took me out for drinks one night and told me that if I really knocked the cover off the ball over the course of the next twelve months, he was confident that I'd get promoted a year earlier than I'd anticipated. Mr. Metropolitan and I had a long talk about it while sitting on the beach at a lovely Caribbean resort, and resolved that we'd wait another year before trying. So we waited.

We actually didn't quite wait the full year -- my grandfather, who would have adored being a great-grandfather, died a few months later and we decided that the time had come to repopulate the planet before we lost any more prospective great-grandparents. I did get promoted early, and was several months pregnant at the time. Having checked off that box (the one labeled "Get Promoted Before Having Baby"), I relaxed, brought a yummy little daughter into the world, and didn't think about work too often during a very enjoyable maternity leave.

When I returned to work post-baby, it became clear that a number of things had changed. All of the people I had originally worked for had left my company to pursue other opportunities, and the vibe at my office was substantially different. People worked a lot later at night. They started working earlier in the morning. They worked weekends, for God's sake! Everyone said they understood my situation -- as part of a two-working-parent family, I had to leave by a certain time and sometimes wouldn't be able to arrive until a certain time and would have to excuse myself to the medical suite a few times a day to provide my daughter with sustenance served up in little plastic bags. Everyone was cool with that. Until they weren't.

I guess I shouldn't say that. Everyone still says that they're cool with my schedule. (Let me be clear -- by any normal calculus, they're still full-blown full-time hours. I'm in the office for 8-10 hours a day and work at home on evenings and weekends when necessary and carry a blackberry and cell phone at all times. It's not like I'm at work from 10 am until 2 pm and calling that a full day.) But my reviews, cloaked in the freeing aura of anonymity, tell another story. "Not terribly hard-working." "Often inaccessible." Funny thing, that. Especially since no one ever questioned my work habits before I went on maternity leave.

So now here I am, in this job that I took several years ago for the express purpose of being able to be both a successful professional and a successful mother. In my heart of hearts, I am about 75% sure that my career switch was the right one. I still don't work most weekends, I still can keep the hours I need, and I still don't travel. But it gives me a pit in my stomach every day to know that I'm looked down upon by my colleagues for doing the right thing by my child. Am I supposed to look for another job that will accord the working mother who chooses not to blow off her kid the respect that I think and hope she deserves? Am I supposed to stay put, ignore the terrible feeling in my gut, and accept the fact that I'm apparently viewed as a slacker? I have no idea.

The one thing I do know is that working longer hours and seeing my daughter less frequently than I currently do is not one of the choices. But of all the things I thought I knew back when I made my career switch, the thing I didn't know -- and couldn't have known -- was how much it would bother me to be looked down upon for insisting upon spending an hour or two a day with my daughter.

Into the Abyss

Welcome to our blog!

I'm the one who posts here who doesn't quite yet qualify as an Urban Mommy. Well, I'm urban, but I prefer to reserve the "mommy" title for myself once I have a child. I'm expecting in January, with about 12 weeks to go.

So far, so good. I feel good, am suffering only relatively minor aches and pains, and our little fetus seems perfectly healthy. I feel very lucky, and very apprehensive. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Getting me into my pregnant state required a lot of time and a lot of medical intervention, so my poor paranoid little brain is simply waiting for something else to go wrong - namely, for this to be other than a perfect pregnancy resulting in a perfect little boy. It's awfully hard to convince myself otherwise - I dream about the horrible things that can happen to my unborn child, both now and when it arrives. I have thoughts when I'm awake that are truly horrifying. Only the arrival of this kid safe and sound is going to quell these fears. Oh well - at least I finally believe I'm pregnant...

Work in my 28-week-pregnant state hasn't changed much. I'm done travelling, which is good, because I discovered that on some airlines, I can't lower my tray table any more. My work life hasn't changed since I told everyone here - of course, that first tri-mester was tough, as I kept falling asleep on my desk. It's awfully hard to explain to someone why you have the imprint of a computer keyboard on your cheek if they don't know you're pregnant. Other than that, the only ramifications of this belly growth so far are that it's often harder to remove myself from the bathroom stalls at my workplace, which have inward swinging doors.

I am living in constant worry about maternity leave. I still don't know how long I'm taking off and under what conditions. I've been putting off the conversation with my boss for a while now. Have to just do it, I guess.

I'll save my worries about day care for a later post.

Welcome

Welcome to Urban Mommies, a place for working mothers who are trying to figure out the best way to navigate the often treacherous waters between a successful career and a fulfilling personal life.

We are professional women who built our careers before building our families. We are exuberant mommies who are fanatical about our offspring and offspring-to-be. We are urbanites who relish the things our cities have to offer. We are wives who cherish the time we spend with our husbands. We are talented individuals who pursue a variety of hobbies and pastimes. And we are people without nearly enough time to do everything we want to do.

Urban Mommies exists so that we can talk about the issues we're facing as working mothers in the big city. Everyone here is strictly anonymous -- you think my mother actually named me Felicity Metropolitan? -- so every topic is fair game. We hope to hear your stories as well, and encourage you to comment early and often.

Again, welcome to Urban Mommies! We are planning to have a lot of fun, and hope you will too.