I am beginning to realize that this lack of quality childcare thing is an epidemic.

Now, I am sure mothers the world over who have been raising children for decades would smack their hands to their forward and give me a rousing “duh,” but as a new mom, this is one part of motherhood I did not think much about before I became pregnant.

I wrote about my childcare angst before, and I am revisiting it now after having some time to go over some options. And here is my first piece of advice: GET ON A LIST NOW. You are not pregnant? Who cares. Get yourself on some sort of childcare list because the wait to get in is about 10 miles long. And this seems to be par for the course. My friend, Marie, sent me this interesting Politico article about the terrible waiting list for Capitol Hill staffers at the employee childcare center. I think it is illustrative of just how challenging it is to find reliable and quality childcare.

And it’s a numbers game, too. How much do you earn? How about after taxes and childcare? Is it still worth it to work? Maybe part-time? Maybe not at all?

Another thing – how happy will you be to hand off your infant to a childcare provider and head on to the 40-hour-a-week rat race? I am sure some women love their jobs and they are willing to “do it all” – work and pay for childcare.

I am not sure I fall into that category. And I do not think it will make me happy.

As the birth of this baby approaches (just about six weeks to go), Dan and I are beginning to see where our allegiances and priorities lie. And what we are willing to sacrifice and what we will not compromise.

This adult stuff is hard, for sure. Someone probably warned me about this, but it does not really hit home until you are living it. And I know I am just joining the ranks of all those other moms who have gone before me and made hard choices. It is hard to know what the right thing is, but at the end of the day, I think we will have to go with our gut and what will work best and make our family the happiest.

When Dan and I were engaged, we went to a book reading and discussion by the famous Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus author John Gray. The talk just happened to be at a near by bookstore, and my parents were going, so we figured we would go, too.

And that John Gray really has the ticket on men and women. Including an infamous “point system” many couples institute in their relationships.

Now, Dan and I are not really point-system people. We do not believe in strict tit-for-tat in that I did this so you do that sort of thing. Or keeping track of who did what. I mean, that is just really exhausting. Between juggling numbers in my head all day at work, computing percentages off at Baby’s R Us, and doing mental cartwheels over logistical arrangements, I just cannot keep track of one more thing. I need all the rest of the mental space for episodes of Oprah and scrapbooking.

So, we do not keep points in the traditional sense, but sometime or another one of us desperately wants to get out of something and tries to use points to get out of it. Like, “I unloaded the dishwasher, reloaded the dishwasher, put away clothes, and took out the trash this week, so can you please do poop patrol?”

And this is where the Mars versus Venus differences come in. Because Dan seems to work off of a weighed point system where more arduous and labor intensive chores receive more points and less challenging tasks receive fewer points.

No, that is just not the way the Venus mind works. One point per task. There simply are no weighted points. You unloaded the dishwasher? One point. You took the car to get an oil change? One point. You cleaned up dog vomit off the carpet? One point. You did all this in the same day? Great, you earned three points.

A point is a point is a point.

While we do not see eye to eye on the way points are calculated, perhaps it does not matter because, as Dan pointed out, one does not really cash in points for anything. It is not like marriage is a Chuck E Cheese in that if you earn enough points you can cash them in for a slap bracelet and exclusive rights to the good TV for a week.

No, it is more like you can just hope to receive the love and affection of the other spouse. And I would say we are pretty good at that. Because competing for who has the most points is just too much. Besides, he would probably beat me anyway.

Thanks to the generosity of our family and friends, it looks like Baby’s R Us exploded in our family room, the baby’s room, our basement…you get the idea.

After my baby shower, I think this baby has just about everything she needs. And then some. All I can say is she better not tell me she has nothing to wear because she received a plethora of adorable outfits. I told Dan I cannot wait for June because then she will have to do a fashion show in all of her cute clothes. Exhibit A:

Too cute.

So much cuteness in fact that we spent another chunk of the weekend at Home Depot purchasing a closet organization system, so we can get all her cute stuff in order. Stay turned as we attempt to turn a closet from 1958 into something more fit for a 2010 baby girl.

During this last trimester I think I have committed a couple divorce-worthy acts against my poor, unsuspecting husband.

My pregnancy has been totally uneventful. Besides feeling super nauseated for the first 14 weeks and learning how to pick things up with my toes to avoid bending over, this pregnancy has been a total non-event.

Until this last trimester when I unleashed the attack of the Crazy Mean Illogical Pregnant Sarah.

Poor Dan was pretty much caught unaware, and to be fair, so was I. We have been pretty low-keyed about the whole thing until sometime around the 30^th week when I decided that enough was enough and we needed to do something about the baby RIGHT NOW. What are we supposed to be doing? I DO NOT KNOW BUT I WANT IT DONE RIGHT THIS VERY SECOND.

And then almost as quickly as Crazy Sarah came, Crazy Sarah left. And I did not really feel like doing anything about anything. We have a crib. Good enough. No sense going into debt for baby junk we do not even need. I am so logical, look at me, being so logical. There will still be stores after she is born for any items we still need to purchase. No need to push the panic button.

But, then, just when I am feeling all Smug Logical, Crazy Sarah comes back with a vengeance and she wants to go to Babies R Us, Buy Buy Baby, Baby Depot and Home Depot (just for good measure) THIS VERY SECOND. For what? FOR WHAT? DOES IT EVEN MATTER?!

And poor Dan is very confused by my Jekyll/Hyde impression. He just thought we agreed that time and civilization will march on after her birth, so we can still address her needs after her arrival. And then I go all ESTROGEN JUNGLE on him before he can say Dr. Brown’s bottles.

Ugh, this is all very confusing. And I fear any blood that used to be transported to my brain is now exclusively traveling via my placenta to the baby. Which is good for her but bad for me. Considering I think blood flow to the brain is very important. Important for things like reading, computation, decision-making skills, logical reasoning – of which I possess none of these abilities at this time. And that is bad news because I still have seven weeks to go. Seven more weeks of mental decline. And Crazy Sarah.

I am beginning to become concerned that this could become a permanent condition, this lack of blood flow to my brain. Or maybe it is lack of oxygen due to her constricting the use of my lungs. Either way, things are not looking up.

So I can only hope that these seven weeks go by pretty fast. If not, Dan is probably going to have me committed.

“What do they even do to you there? Anything? Why do you have to go so much?”

I used to go the OB every month. Then every two weeks. And now I am going weekly.

Dan cannot wrap his brain about why on Earth I would need to go that often. Especially because, according to him, they do not actually do anything.

“Well,” I told him, “they check me for all kinds of stuff.”

“Like what,” he said.

“They weigh me – even though I keep insisting I can just give them an estimate and we could stop bothering with this torturous scale thing – take my blood pressure, I pee in a cup to check my protein and sugar levels. Oh, and they use the Doppler to check the baby’s heart rate.”

“Psh,” he said. “See, I told you. Besides prescribing you those prenatal vitamins you complain about, they do not actually do anything.”

You see, my husband is an engineer. He thinks in a very certain – what I like to call engineerical – ways. To him (and maybe to other husbands) when you go someplace, like a doctor’s office, you expect a something to come out of it. Like a prescription or a diagnosis or results from a scan. Something tangible.

But when I do for my now weekly OB appointments, I do the usual scale, pee, heart checks, and my doctor asks me if I am feelings any intense cramping, bleeding, or anything else out of the ordinary. And, fortunately in my case, I have nothing to report at any of these meetings. Of course, other than wishing time would speed up so I can again reach my own feet so as to paint my toenails. Oh, yeah, and to meet our kid.

Of course Dan does not find my answers too compelling to warrant all these visits. But I reminded him the best is yet to come. There will come a day this June, in the very near future, when my OB will actually perform something he can see, be it cutting me open or guiding our baby out of my birth canal, which will result in the ultimate tangible – our very own kid.

So, hang on, I tell him. The finale is yet to be seen. And all those boring visits are like acts in a play leading up to a very exciting conclusion.