Hellobee

The Dolphin family lives in the DC metro area for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the job opportunities for two attorneys are much better out here. Prior to having kids, despite all of my complaints about DC, I think we would have happily stayed here without giving it a second thought. Sure, both of our immediate families lived on the West Coast, but we could visit them a couple times a year.

After having kids, we realized how much of a support system we are really missing. I see friends on Facebook post about weekly visits from the grandparents, about having a date night out while grandparents or aunts and uncles babysit, or just lovely pictures of my friends’ parents playing with my friends’ kids. In an emergency situation, backup childcare or other help is more readily available when being close to family. When I was in labor with Panda, had we lived closer to family, I think it would have been much easier to find someone to watch Lion so that Mr. Dolphin could be with me in the hospital. We also want our kids to have a close relationship with our family and, although we are blessed to live in an age of great technology like Skype and FaceTime, it doesn’t replace in person interactions.

Visits to and from family this summer confirmed just how much we miss being around our family. When my dad and stepmother came out to visit in June, Lion was initially shy, but then became interested and happily chatted up a storm with my dad. He refused to sit in his stroller when we went for a walk, insisting on walking while holding onto Grandpa’s hand. He walked further that day than he usually does, motivated by keeping up with Grandpa. I also loved watching my dad interact with Lion, reading him books, playing with magnatiles and talking to him. One of my favorite moments was when Lion pretended that the storage cubes in our living room were train seats. After he announced that he was riding a choo choo, he said that the train was going through a tunnel. My dad pointed out the living room window and asked, “What do you see out the train window?” At first, Lion just stared back at my dad. After my dad repeated the question a couple of times, Lion looked out the window then turned back to my dad and announced, “We’re in a tunnel! No light in tunnel!” I wish we had more opportunities for these special moments.

Lion walked all the way to the store, thrilled to be holding hands with Grandpa.

When we visited Seattle for my brother-in-law’s wedding this summer, we stayed with Mr. Dolphin’s dad and stepmother. We also spent time with his mom (who came out this spring and helped out Mr. Dolphin with our newborn and toddler while I went to Vancouver for a work trip for a week), stepfather, stepbrother, and some extended family. We had so much fun watching Lion and Panda interact with their grandparents. Although Lion is very shy, he quickly warmed up and was obsessed with following Grandpa around, pretty much everywhere. As a bonus, Mr. Dolphin’s dad and stepmother have two dogs and two fish tanks; Lion was pretty much in heaven. I wish we had more opportunities for our kids to bond with our family.

At the wedding, Mr. Dolphin’s aunt took Panda from me after he fell asleep to ensure that I had time to eat. Later that evening, she took him back to give me a break . . . and then held onto him for pretty much the rest of the night! She was also invaluable in helping get the kids ready for the wedding and giving me another pair of hands while Mr. Dolphin was attending to his groomsman duties. I wish we had more help from available (and willing) family members, generally.

My mom and aunt visited early this fall. Days before they arrived, Lion came down with a high fever that may or may not have been hand, foot and mouth disease. Lion recovered quickly, but then I came down with a very high fever that reached 105 degrees at one point, and seemed to peak the day that they arrived. The following day, Mr. Dolphin also came down with the fever and we were both exhausted as we alternated between being sweaty and having chills. My fever lasted five days, until I finally went to the doctor for some antibiotics. My mom and aunt primarily took care of Panda to help us avoid contact with our infant; Panda was the only member of the Dolphin household who didn’t get a fever that week! I wish we had more emergency help available for situations when both of us get sick, one of us goes out of town, or some other situations arises.

I wish our family could share in all the fun developmental milestones, holidays, and more.

We never minded being away from our families until we had kids. Now, though, we wish we had a little bit more support and that our kids could build stronger, closer relationships with the rest of our family. At the same time, like anything in life, there are pros and cons of family proximity.

Pros:

• Emergency help/backup plan
• Occasional babysitting help
• Our kids will know our family better, get to play with their step-cousins, and our parents won’t seem like strangers
• Lower travel costs (since we won’t have to pay for four cross-country airplane tickets each year just to visit our family)
• Ability to attend family events whenever we want (from barbecues to weddings)

Cons:

• Will the special indulgences become bad habits? (For example, we are very careful about what we feed our children; some of our family members are less careful and offer our kids food that we normally don’t let them have. It’s fine for special occasions, but not all the time.)
• It may be harder to live our own lives as we get pulled into family obligations
• No power struggles/parenting battles from what I know would only be “helpful” parenting advice; we may be raising our children differently than we were raised ourselves and being across the country avoids any of those possible tensions

Admittedly, there are much stronger pros than cons. Mr. Dolphin and I currently weighing our options, trying to figure out where we want to be in the near future (say, the next three years). Will we stay here in DC where the job prospects are generally better? Do we move back to San Francisco where cost of living is exorbitant (higher than here in DC)? Do we try for Seattle, which after some research, also reveals a very high cost of living but lower wages and less opportunities for our careers? Or do we try for somewhere completely new? Perhaps somewhere that is closer to the West Coast, but not San Francisco or Seattle? Or maybe somewhere even farther away, somewhere we’ve never lived before (I think both Mr. Dolphin and I have the wanderlust gene)?

At the end of the day, our decision isn’t really going to be based off the pros and cons I listed above. With two children, student loans from law school, and having spent our entire careers doing public interest work (read: low paying work), we simply don’t have the financial freedom to pick up and move anywhere we want. Being so far into our careers at this point and with the huge amount of time I’ve invested in policy work, we also want to be sure that the city we go to next has opportunities to build on our experience. As a two career couple, we both have to have realistic job prospects. Wherever we move, we want to be sure that it is somewhere relatively safe (though there are many developing countries we would be more than happy to live in) and that we are keeping our children’s interests high on our list of priorities.

We are in an active exploration phase of figuring out what our next goals will be. Stay tuned for part 2, in which I make the case for going somewhere completely new and different.