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[quote=Anonymous]I would start sniffing around the parental leave policies at your respective companies. My company had a 4 month fully paid leave, and you could take up to a year (after 4 months it would be unpaid) and return to your position if you got it cleared with your department head. I knew a bunch of women who took 6 months, for instance, since swinging 2 months unpaid is usually doable even for a dual income couple, and the difference between returning to work at 4 months versus 6 months is actually pretty big.

If you can take a decent maternity leave (or split between maternity and paternity leave, though for infants it is my personal opinion that it makes the most sense for mom to take most of the leave because she is still recovering from pregnancy/childbirth and is often breastfeeding and will therefore get the most benefit from the time off work), find a daycare or other childcare that is within budget, and don't have super demanding jobs, it's more than doable. It's a lot of ducks to line up, but in this area, a lot of people do it.

Talk to parents at your work, talk to parents in your neighborhood, talk to you friends. Don't take everything they say as gospel (newish parents love to tell soon-to-be parents what to do, because they've been getting unsolicited advice for a while and want to turn the tables), but collect info. Where do their kids go to daycare. Go ahead and ask questions like how much their nanny share actually costs (we did, which is how we learned that a full-time nanny runs 40k or more a year in this area!) and how they found it. Ask people how long they took off and if they wished they'd had more or less. Again, none of this is prescriptive. Everyone is different and everyone makes their own choices and there is truly no right or wrong way.

And then stay flexible. We planned on staying dual-income, and then for a variety of reasons I decided to leave my job after returning and was a SAHM for another year before returning to work. Like you, we never really anticipated doing that and didn't originally think we could make it work financially. But then it became the thing we needed to do, and we made it work. That's what people do -- they figure it out. It sucks, and there should be way more societal support for new families, but most people do figure it out. And at 200k HHI and relatively stable jobs, and being as young as you are, I don't have any concerns about you. You can put that puzzle together.[/quote]

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