In which I pose three questions.

My three immediate concerns, in no particular order:

(1) Circumcise? Or not?

I am generally opposed to lopping off parts of some one's anatomy for religious and/or cosmetic purposes. If someone can present me with a decent medical reason for doing it, I might be persuaded. For the most part, though, it seems that the arguments for chopping off the foreskin boil down to "everybody else does it." Ladies, would you be less attracted to a man with a foreskin?

(2) Can I fit a baby seat in the back of my car?

Not only do I really like my car, but (a) it is paid for, and (b) now that I am a civil servant, I will never again be able to afford another one like it. It is six years old. I was hoping to get at least another year or two out of it. But while it has a back seat, it is a smallish two-door convertible. Should I trade it in now, while it still has some market value, and get a Matrix or a Fit or some other small, baby-seat-friendly vehicle? Or do we try to get another couple of years out of this car first? As part of the deliberations on this issue, we must consider that my car sits parked and motionless for five or six days out of the week, because live in the city and can walk nearly everywhere we need to go. And also, Cynthia -- my wife -- hasn't driven a car since she was 19. Plus, she can't drive a manual transmission, which is what my car has. So we don't need or want two cars.

(3) How will I afford infant care?

I don't understand how people can hand their infants off to their parents and go back to work. My parents are both retired, but I can assure you that they have zero interest in spending their days at home with a baby to take care of. They did their time raising babies. Decades ago. Cynthia's parents -- her mother, anyhow -- might be temperamentally inclined to provide regular day care, but she has a job. And lives a few hundred miles away.

Here is the list of countries which do not require paid parental leave for workers: Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States of America. I'm not sure what I can add to that. It goes beyond disgraceful. Beyond embarrassing. It's so pathetic it's funny.

My employer, and Cynthia's, adhere to the disease-model of parental leave -- 12 weeks of FMLA leave, which is unpaid, except to the extent that you have leftover vacation and/or sick leave to use up. After the 12 weeks, get your ass back to work. One wonders: where do employers think that each succeeding generation of employees comes from?

At any rate... a neighbor referred us to a downtown child care facility that offers infant care. We looked it up. It charges $1,700 a month.

That's simply out of the question. There is no way on Earth we could afford that.

Which leads to my next point: Cynthia and I, combined, make a lot of money compared to most other people in the city. We are not rich, by any stretch of the imagination; we have to skimp and save to pay for the repairs and upkeep on our house, and we don't own or do anything extravagant, but we make a little more than five times the median household income for Baltimore City, and almost three times the median household income for the state. Compared to our friends and peers, we are perfectly ordinary, but these figures mean that there are a LOT of people out there with a lot less than us. So what do they do with their children? They have jobs, just like we do; they have abominable parental leave benefits, just like we do; the childcare center charges them $1,700 a month, same as us. So what do they do? Do 2/3 of working parents rely on friends and family to take care of their infants while they work? What if your friends and family all have jobs of their own?

I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Mandating paid parental leave -- at at least 2/3 salary, for at least six months -- for large employers would be a net good thing, I suppose, although it wouldn't solve the problem entirely. France has a pretty good system -- creche care until age 3 or so, followed by preschool until age 5, all of it government-subsidized so that monthly childcare costs are no more than a couple hundred Euros. But to pay for that, we would have to either raise taxes (which the very rich people -- whom we now bail out with tax dollars, whenever market forces and/or their own greed and stupidity threaten their riches -- won't like) or cut vital services (such as stupid, mismanaged wars of choice.) Since the idea of collecting taxes in a rational fashion, or spending them according to legitimate national priorities, is anathema to the political leaders of both parties, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Which still leave the questions unanswered. How will we do this? And how do the many people less fortunate than us do this?