Del and Sam on the swings at Luther Burbank Park on Mercer Island.

It’s been a busy past week for us here, wrapping up this morning with a reunion of our Great Starts prenatal class. Most of the couples were able to attend and we got to meet the new additions to the families and exchange delivery stories. It was nice chance to catch up, but the highlight was definitely the last ten minutes, as we parked all of the babies on the couch for group photos. Del was one of only two boys born from the class, so he’s sandwiched in between four girls in the photos. Quite the ladies man!

In addition to today’s class reunion, Del also began day care this week. We initially were leaning more toward having a nanny in a few days a week, rather than day care, but upon further review, the day care option seems to be a better match economically. Still pricey (the going rate in Seattle for infants starts at about $1,000 per month), and incredibly hard to find. In reviewing places the past couple weeks, we quickly found that most providers here in the Seattle area were backed up with waiting lists, most anywhere from six months to eighteen months!

We really lucked out though, finding a local in-home day care program that we quickly fell in love with (and that happened to have a single opening for an infant). We were initially a bit hesitant about a home-based program (given that the only time you really hear about them is when something goes wrong and they end up on the evening news), but were quickly put at ease when we met Julie.

Her home and program is local, about 1.5 miles from us (she’s in Madison Valley) and she and her husband Warren have been licensed providers for nearly twenty years. We spoke with a number of the current children’s parents and everyone had rave reviews for the program. Del seemed really comfortable in his first meeting with Julie, and so we’ve taken the plunge and signed him up.

He’ll be attending Monday-Thursday, which will give us some much-needed additional time each day to get work done, the house clean, and for Dianne to begin prepping for her new classes (she returns to teaching at Western Washington University in January).

That pretty much brings us up to date! With the Thanksgiving holiday coming up this week, we’ll be heading down to Lakewood for a few days, then getting ready for our trip to Las Vegas (to visit Dianne’s family) in mid-December.

Thank you again to everyone that came out to Jeff and Nikki’s this past weekend for what was a wonderful baby shower! It was a great way to kick-off our “march to parenthood” by spending time with friends and family over cocktails and mocktails.Below are a couple pics from the shower; you can view a larger set of baby shower pictures in our Flickr photo set.