Being There

We're less than four months from Sara's due date. We're a little more than seven months from our approximate moving date, which doubles as my job-quitting date. I'm maybe four-five months from starting to send out my resume and about five months from thinking seriously about going to Chicago for interviews. It's this last thing that has me just very slightly concerned.
I'm not "worried" exactly, since I know that when the time comes I will have the confidence and the ability to find a suitable job, but right now, this far away from the process, there is space for me to be concerned. I blame this wholly on my upcoming fatherhood, meaning that I wouldn't be concerned if it were just me I'd be supporting.
When we move, our baby will be about three months old. Sara will have no insurance even before the move. I will have mine, but that will end as soon as I quit. There will be COBRA to float us along, but that's not ideal and I hear it's not cheap. Me finding a job will be about more than just income, it will be about protection. For once, I will have to concern myself with benefits. I'll also have a real sense of urgency.
When I was on my last job search, I was right out of college and so the mere idea of urgency was a little foreign. I searched in earnest for a while, but it wasn't until I approached my self-imposed deadline that I bothered much with really getting it done, and then even when I did, I wasn't very picky. This time I will have to be picky. I will also have to find something relatively quickly. You can see how this might create a conflict. I want to have a high-paying job with good benefits, but I will be under pressure (both the real kind and the unnecessarily self-imposed) to take whatever I can get.
There is also the important matter of availability. For me to get a job that pays higher than my current one, it's quite likely that I'll have to take on both added responsibility and added hours, with the former being basically a prerequisite. The problem here is that with a newborn at home and a wife that will at some point be trying to re-enter the workforce herself on a part-time basis, I will have a very very strong desire to be home to help and just to enjoy my family. I have no desire to be one of those dads who gets home late and is too tired or too preoccupied with thoughts of work to be of any use. My priority will always be my home first and my job a distant second. (Not something I'm going to put on a resume, but that's a shame, because isn't that kind of loyalty/devotion/responsibility something that a company would value? Sure it is, just not in the bottom-line corporate world we live in, where all employees are meant to wholly exist to serve the company. At least that's how it works in NYC. Maybe Chicago will be different. Probably not.)
One of those TLC home-improvement shows was on the other day. One of the couples doing a full renovation had a newborn child, and the father was doing most of the renovating himself. The work was so comprehensive that they couldn't live in the house during, so for multiple months the mother and child stayed with a family/friend. During this time, the father worked his full-time job, then spent the evenings away from his family renovating the house. I will always admire a man willing to make that kind of sacrifice, but I'm not sure at what point it would be an acceptable trade-off for me. I don't want to ever be a hands-off parent. I don't want to ever leave my wife to care for the kid alone, even if I'm away doing something to make us more comfortable in the future. Some people can do it, but I'm not sure to what extent I can. I'm thinking I'd have to figure out an alternate solution if I were ever in the same situation.