Inching along

Needless to say, I officially freaked myself out yesterday. It was good though. Scare the motivation into myself and all that, because you know what? I am already making forward progress.
First the tiny accomplishment! I found a glider and bought it. Yeah buddy. I lucked out because a mom just put it up on Craigslist yesterday and I saw it right away and called. I almost hesitated due to the mechanics of going to get it, but I decided for the price, I needed to move. Securing said glider required me to drive home (45 minutes north), jump in Andy's truck (which he already had running and ready to go when I arrived), and driving over an hour back down south. If I had known yesterday was going to be the day I found the glider I would have brought his truck instead and it probably would have saved us at least an hour and a half of driving and gas. But for the price, it had to be snatched up. Get this, I found it for $40 and it was in good shape! Happy dance. To celebrate what I shall dub Glider Victory 2010 we stopped at the Olive Garden on the way home for dinner. Mmm. Normally I just get the soup salad and breadsticks, but I was jonesing for some asparagus.....yeah I can't explain that one either. I am not sure if this has ever happened to you, but I basically looked through the menu to see what came with asparagus and then ordered what I thought would be the best option. The lesson I learned from that one is that I should have ordered salad and breadsticks and a side of asparagus. The dish I ordered was okay, just not really worth it considering all I wanted was the asparagus.
To top off that experience, this morning I was reminded what asparagus does to a person when I made my first bathroom stop. Pew!
Next, Yay for my brain because I remembered to bring the list of Doctors that my midwife recommended this morning. Turns out both of them accept my insurance, score! I left a message with the first one, he's closed today and made a meet and greet appointment with the other one for Mid-January. Woohoo! I think I want to meet both of them. The one I have an appointment with is slightly closer to the house, but the other one is a big supporter of home birth. His wife had their kids at home and he is the back-up doctor for my mid-wife. He's about 25 minutes from our house as opposed to about 10 minutes for the other guy. With the childcare acrobatics I am about to try to figure out, it might be beneficial to limit the driving we need to do for the doctor. But I am thinking with this one I should meet them both, ask them my burning questions and figure out who feels best.
And my last to do list update involves the child care thing. I woke up this morning an hour before my alarm and I couldn't stop worrying about the logistics of the childcare thing.

Just to give you guys an idea of what I am trying to figure out, here is a visual of our life starting in a couple of weeks. The red line is me. Normally I drive 8 blocks to the Park-n-Ride, get on a bus that takes me downtown and then ride the train down to my office in Greenwood Village. It takes me about 45 minutes each way if I don't dawddle and walk around downtown on my way home. Driving is another monster. In the morning it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and the way home is usually 45 minutes to an hour and half. Yuck. I definitely like taking public transit just because dealing with traffic is not so fun. But that limits my mobility once I am down at work and poses some issues once Nugget gets here, but I'll get into those later.

Andy is the blue line. He was accepted at CU Boulder, Woohoo! and goes to orientation next week and then starts the week after. He's probably going to be riding the bus for the most part as well just because maneuvering in and around Boulder with a car is ridunkulous. To make driving worth it he would need a campus parking permit $$$$. So bus it is.

So as you can see from the map, there are three possibilities for childcare locations:

1. Down by my work.
• Cons: I will have to start driving everyday, spending more time in traffic, finding reasonably priced childcare in this area is hard because people who live down here are rich! If he comes down with me everyday he will need to be at the sitter about 50 hours a week...which is going to cost a lot. 
• Pros: The baby would be near me, I could potentially leave work at lunch to go feed him.
2. Near Andy's School.
• Cons: the baby would be about an hour and a half from me. If they couldn't get ahold of Andy in an emergency I am a long way away. It will either require Andy to drive or take the baby, baby stuff, and all his books for the day on the bus. Poor guy.
• Pros: this would require the least amount of daycare potentially because Andy could drop him off before class and pick him up afterward.
3. Near the House.
• Cons: neither of us will be really close in an emergency
• Pros: it would be the most flexible so, depending on our schedules, either of us could drop him off or pick him up. If Andy can take afternoon-evening classes then potentially the baby would be there mid-day and I would get him on my way home. So it is possible that this would be less day care then if he was in Boulder.

As you can see, it is sort of hard to decide which one would be the absolute best situation. And it is dependent upon several things....which of course we won't know until after orientation next week. Andy has four more semesters of school and up until this point he has been going year-round. But he has also just been taking general ed stuff. My hope is that CU will offer enough summer classes in his degree program where he could go full-time this summer (the benefit being he would graduate in May 2012, as opposed to December 2012). But from my experience, summer classes are usually an all-day, every-day kind of thing. There probably wouldn't be much hope of him just having classes three days a week and there would most definitely be no option of doing just early morning or evening classes (at least I would be shocked if they offered those during the summer).

The plus side to there not being summer classes available would be that we can possibly not worry about the daycare question until August. Obviously a very seductive thought. That would be if things worked out just a certain way though. Basically, Nugget can't come until his due date, and it would be better if he is late. If that happens, then I would finish my maternity leave just as Andy is finishing his Spring Semester. Voila! Childcare avoided!

....Anyway I am probably boring the crap out of you guys. Hopefully you've just stopped reading.

But this is all the stuff on my brain when it comes to finding child care. It's not just cost; it's location and logistics. And the logistics will probably change every semester. 

Here's my solution for calming my brain and trying to be patient through the next week and a half until after Andy goes to orientation and gets stuff figured out. I made a list...shocking I know. I made a list of childcare options in each of the three areas. For each provider I put the distance away from our landmarks (either the house, my work, or Andy's school) and I wrote some notes about cost (if it was available information), pros, cons, my thoughts, etc. 

I have definitely considered starting to look into them all right away. But we're talking about 15+ options. That is a lot of places to go see and people to talk to. So I pressed the save button on that list and I am going to try to calm myself down for another week until after Andy has spoken to the school advisor. If there is no way he is going to be taking summer, then why even look into the options near his school or my work until later? It will probably still be beneficial to find a place near the house, in case he needs a day for sanity, or something like that. But no need to tackle the whole list. We can postpone this whole debacle for another 5 months at least. 

I hope I made enough progress on the childcare thing to calm my brain down. I don't want to worry about this for the next 7 days. I want to relax, take long naps, wear my fuzzy warm socks I got for Christmas and re-cover this glider and ottoman. 

I hope you all have an amazing New Years. I hope that your last days of 2010 are warm, happy and filled with delicious asparagus.....Just a tip, if you wait to eat the asparagus until Friday night, you won't have to deal with the smelly aftermath until next year. You're Welcome.