One small step for Jacob, one giant leap for his caregivers

We are one of the very lucky few who have our parents available to watch our kids while we're at work during the week. My mother-in-law no longer works and she watches the kids 3 days out of the week. My mom work's graveyard and my dad's work schedule rotates so they watch the kids 2 days out of the week. On top of that, my parents or one of my sisters (whoever is available) will pick up Desiree from school 5 days a week. They never ask for any monetary compensation, although we do try to do something extra special for them on Mother's or Father's day or birthdays, etc. We are certainly spoiled by this set-up.

One compensation that they DO happily accept is being witness to the kids' "firsts". My mother-in-law called my husband today to proudly annouce that Jacob took three steps all by himself! When my husband called to pass the news on to me (I was in a meeting all morning so I had missed her call), I felt crying. Both from the joy of Jacob taking his first steps and also because I had missed it. Again. It doesn't matter how many times I miss one of my kids' "firsts", it always hurts like the first time.

If Alfred had it his way, I would be a stay-at-home-mom. We had discussed this early on in our marriage. Our choices were:

#1 - relocate out of California to a place where his income alone could sufficiently provide for the family. This would mean leaving Alana behind. At this time, Alana was just a toddler. There was no way she would be able to travel alone to spend time with us where ever we decided to move to, which likely WOULDN'T have been a hop-skip-and-a-jump away. It would have been a significant distance from Cali to really experience a lower cost of living. And would we be able to afford to travel out to San Diego regularly to get her and bring her back? And would her mom even be OK with sending a 3-year-old to where ever it was that we ended up living for WEEKS at a time? Not to mention leaving our parents, siblings and friends we've grown up with all behind. And if we wanted to move back to San Diego, could we afford it? Likely not.

#2 - I think is a choice more typical to my culture. We could live with one of our parents so that we could afford to live off of one income and I could stay home with the kids. Our parents would most likely not ask us to pay them anything for living at their house. Not for rent, food or utilities. They would provide all this to us (AND OUR KIDS) because they are our parents and love us. I'm not even being sarcastic right now. They truly would. They would insist that we save whatever money we could for our future. We would give them money anyway, even if they didn't ask for it or want it. That would be our personal choice. But I can tell you that there ARE some people out there who live with their parents and don't give them a dime and the parents are totally fine with it. Again, it goes back to our culture. In the Philippines, it is not unusual for more than one family to live under one roof and all of the families would take care of each other the best that they could.

#3 - buy our OWN house in San Diego and both of us work our tails off 40+ hours a week.

Number one is a no-brainer - we were NOT going to leave Alana behind, no way, no how. Number two might seem like a good choice to some but we figured that our parents had taken care of us long enough. Once we got married, it was definitely time to leave the nest. We wanted a place to call our own. We wanted our parents to feel proud about raising children that were financially responsible. We wanted our parents to be able to have a break from their grandkids in the evenings and weekends so that when they DID see them, they would haved missed them. All the choices involved a sacrifice of some degree. Number three seemed the less painful sacrifice of the three. Until days like today.