Here, Daycare, Take My Wallet

How much? I'm sorry. How much? And that's every month? That's not an annual fee? Are you sure? Can you double-check? 

Bridget and I made our first visit to a daycare center today. My breathing is finally getting back to normal now. I expect the color to return to my face early tomorrow afternoon. At least I hope that happens.

For now, I'm left with one burning question: How the hell do people pay for daycare?

It's insane. I mean, daycare centers call it tuition. Tuition! It's daycare! There aren't any co co-eds or keg parties or dorms. Tuition!

There's a range, of course. There are top-tier places, decent places, and places you wouldn't want to leave your child. We've explored them all online. But today was our first trip to an actual, brick-and-mortar business that we might entrust with the most important thing we ever create. (That is, if we ever get off the "wait list," but that's another story.) And this place was nice. Not like chandeliers and golden pacifiers nice, but good, quality people taking care of your child. The price tag: $2,100 per month. Punching that into a calculator (which, fortunately for me, is free to use online), that comes out to $25,200 per year.

Do you know what else you can do with that kind of money? Are you curious? Well, I was. So I came up with these five things:
1. Just over 56 nights at the Ritz Carlton in Boston.
2. A new Honda Civic and 2,000 gallons of gas.
3. Just under seven years of tuition at Cal State, Northridge. (That's an actual college.)
4. Just over 630 boxes of these diapers from Diapers.com. (And there are 258 diapers in each box! Also, can someone buy us a box? Please?)
5. Twenty-five roundtrip flights to Hawaii. (Ha, vacation. Yeah, right.)

Bridget and I are fairly conservative when it comes to money. As she's written about, we're in the process of getting rid of all our debt before the baby comes in August. No more college loans, no more car payments, no more big credit card bills. Nothing.

And that's all well and good, but it doesn't seem to matter. We're going to be eating Ramen noodles and store brand peanut butter on stale bread for the rest of our lives.

I have two final questions before I start rolling pennies for the rest of the night:
1. Any advice?
2. Do people really have more than one kid? Is that possible?