Now that Hayden's nearing her first birthday, I'm starting to reflect and assess. A lot. About everything. In hindsight, I'd choose to do a few things differently — get Hayden to nap in her crib sooner, purchase far less unnecessary stuff — but not too many. Raising a baby in New York City has been fun, and a whole lot easier than people think. How can it not be, with ready access to so many wonderful resources?

Sure, there have been some major drawbacks. The high cost of living. The lack of central air. The lack of space, for that matter. Living in such close proximity — hello, noisy upstairs neighbors! — can be excruciatingly stressful. And, as my sister said last week, living in such a dirty, polluted city doesn't make a whole lot of sense to someone with so many environmental concerns. She seemed to have a valid point. Or so I thought, until I did some research. Turns out that the very drawbacks that make living in NYC almost unbearable at times are actually what make it a far more eco-friendly place to live than, say, Norwalk, Connecticut. Which may on the surface be less dirty than NYC, but is it actually less polluted? A quick visit to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory site, which gave our neighborhood far more favorable scores than Norwalk, would seem to say just the opposite. And as for how eco-friendly we can actually be when living in the big, bad city... well, I played around with a "green calculator", a tool that determines how many planets your lifestyle would take to support it if everyone lived like you, to find out. Here in northern Brooklyn, our lifestyle uses 2.4 planets. Ouch. Translated to house-dwelling, car-dependent Norwalk, our same lifestyle would use 4.5. Double ouch!

Who would have guessed? I knew that living car-free made a difference, but I never knew how much. I just assumed that more of the impact of our eco-friendly, urban lifestyle came from the eco-friendly and less from the urban. As for those drawbacks, I now choose to view them as happy sacrifices. And I'd gladly make them all over again. Hopefully Hayden agrees.