The County of Kings has been my home for seven years. When my husband and I were ready to settle down and have children, we knew we didn’t want to do it on the youthful yet oh-so-pricey Lower East Side, where our love had first blossomed. Brooklyn, everyone informed us, was the place to go.

Despite the general wisdom that Park Slope was the ideal breeding ground, we fell hard for the traditionally Italian enclave of Carroll Gardens, and nested into a full floor in a wide brownstone on a tree-lined street. They must be putting Clomid in the water on this side of the Hudson, because it wasn’t long before our vocabulary expanded to include words like Zutano and Whoozit. We became, like everyone else in the neighborhood, the stroller-pushing parents of two.

As our family expanded, so did our ambitions. We loved our apartment, but longed for the stability of home ownership. We grew fed up with hauling our laundry to the ignobly named Bleach House, and worn down by a building whose plumbing system was more volatile than our 2-year-olds.

“Someday, we’ll live somewhere we can have a dishwasher,” I told my mate, “and when we do, we’re going to redirect all the time and energy we spend sudsing cutlery into screwing.”

We also dreamed of something with a more sensible layout than the open-floor plan we inhabited—something that might give our clan some measure of privacy. I was tired of hiding in the bathroom when I needed to get away, weary of cranking up the white-noise machine to hurriedly grope my spouse in the dark while my children slept close by. Basically, I was willing to spend our combined life savings for a goddamn door.

We knew we couldn’t afford a house in our neighborhood, though it didn’t stop us from looking at a few. But our budget capped around the $400,000 mark, roughly a million less than the going rate for South Brooklyn brownstones. We looked at houses further out, spending weekends pushing ourselves to the furthest limits of the borough. We saw dumpy little shotgun shacks located on the expressway, places with termites and noisy neighbors who eyed us suspiciously as we filed optimistically into open houses. We lowered our sights to condos and co-ops, our eyes glazing over at an astonishing array of identical cabinets and countertops contained within outrageously priced, dismal buildings in corners of the borough where the orange line doesn’t run.

And yet, every week it seemed some magazine article was still trumpeting the discovery of Brooklyn. Be not afraid, Manhattanites! they reassured. There are wine stores, and places to buy ironic T-shirts! If it’s good enough for Steve Buscemi, you can handle it, too! But when Heath Ledger is buying a $3 million brownstone in your hood and housing prices go up 35 percent in one year, maybe it’s time to rethink the whole poor-relation shtick. There was a time when living in Brooklyn seemed like a radical step. But like independent films and Ikea, the alternative was rapidly morphing into the big-budget mainstream.

“Call me when you’re ready to look in Montclair,” a friend had said. “All the Broadway people live in Maplewood now,” my husband’s co-worker had crowed. But we didn’t want to go. We’re the kind of people whose quality of life directly correlates with our ability to run out and buy individually wrapped fig bars at 2 a.m. We were Brooklynites, true and true, as my 718-bred daughters say it. We clung to our self-image as borough-dwelling renegades, even as a condo with single units going for a million plus slowly rose a block away.

We knew we couldn’t handle the suburbs, but when the local papers began trumpeting shiny new developments in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, we realized our days here were numbered. We had combed from Prospect Heights to Greenwood Heights and never felt the slightest tug of connection. We had pondered the hype of Bushwick as the next big thing, but reconsidered when we saw the public-school test scores. We had gone to Sunset Park and Midwood, only to find ourselves staring at sad patches on the highway that were all our money could buy. All we wanted was to throw all our money into someplace not completely hovel-like, in a neighborhood we could venture out with relative assurance we wouldn’t get shot. Or worse, be bored. And now that the last scraps of land on the borough were on the block, we’d come to the end of the line. Nowhere to go but the Atlantic.

So instead, we did the only thing you can when you reach the edge: We turned in the other direction. One Saturday, we dragged ourselves to the furthest end of Manhattan and got out of the train at the very last stop. We found a dismal strip of Broadway dotted with dollar stores and Dunkin’ Donuts. But we also found, to our great surprise, dramatically sloping streets, blocks and blocks of lovely old apartment buildings, and a heart-stoppingly beautiful park, full of caves and woods and marshes. Inwood lacks the pristine grandeur and Zagat Guide destinations of our current habitat. Instead, it has a ragged charm that seduced us instantly. I used to think the city stopped somewhere around Columbia Presbyterian. I was thrilled to be wrong.

It was not a smooth search. Our budget still couldn’t carry us into “sprawling” or “sun-drenched” territory, even there. Noise was a factor. Fixer-uppers were not uncommon. And the standard-issue second bedrooms in most units were roughly the dimensions of something out of Prison Break. One realtor, with a 900-square-foot apartment to sell, informed me, “Your children would grow to hate you if you put them here.” Yet of all the reasons I’ve ever heard for hating your parents, being raised in New York isn’t one of them. We kept looking. And then we stopped.

The apartment is smaller. I’ll lose my middle-room office and have to get rid of a ton of our possessions. My daughters will no longer have sunlight streaming in through their bedroom windows. We still have to pass the co-op board. There’s no Starbucks, no Barnes & Noble, no theater, no gourmet shop where Dutch cheese is called “how-dah.” I have broken out in rashes trying to figure out the schools. And the A train ride to Century 21 is sufficiently long enough to merit meal service and a movie. It is, in many ways, a highly impractical choice. But then, falling in love usually is.

A few yards away from the spot I hope to call home in a few months, there’s a rock. On it is a plaque commemorating the alleged spot where, in 1626, Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan. The location, it seems, is an auspicious one for real-estate transactions. For less than the cost of a handyman special in Flatbush, I’m going to live in a two-bedroom prewar apartment on a park in Manhattan, and that’s not too shabby. It’s like getting turned down by the community college and finding out you can go to Oxford.

If we’d left and gone to West Orange, we’d be home now. But that wasn’t going to happen; we’re city people through and through. I’ll have to redefine my self-image as a trailblazing Brooklynite, but that’s O.K. My husband says we can think of Inwood as “Manhattan with an asterisk.” And while I love that the forest will be at my doorstep, I love that there’s a deli around the corner (right near the secondhand shop selling leopard-print coats) even more. Because, for me, the only thing harder than finding a home in New York City was the thought of ever living anywhere else.

The County of Kings has been my home for seven years. When my husband and I were ready to settle down and have children, we knew we didn’t want to do it on the youthful yet oh-so-pricey Lower East Side, where our love had first blossomed. Brooklyn, everyone informed us, was the place to go.

Despite the general wisdom that Park Slope was the ideal breeding ground, we fell hard for the traditionally Italian enclave of Carroll Gardens, and nested into a full floor in a wide brownstone on a tree-lined street. They must be putting Clomid in the water on this side of the Hudson, because it wasn’t long before our vocabulary expanded to include words like Zutano and Whoozit. We became, like everyone else in the neighborhood, the stroller-pushing parents of two.

As our family expanded, so did our ambitions. We loved our apartment, but longed for the stability of home ownership. We grew fed up with hauling our laundry to the ignobly named Bleach House, and worn down by a building whose plumbing system was more volatile than our 2-year-olds.

“Someday, we’ll live somewhere we can have a dishwasher,” I told my mate, “and when we do, we’re going to redirect all the time and energy we spend sudsing cutlery into screwing.”

We also dreamed of something with a more sensible layout than the open-floor plan we inhabited—something that might give our clan some measure of privacy. I was tired of hiding in the bathroom when I needed to get away, weary of cranking up the white-noise machine to hurriedly grope my spouse in the dark while my children slept close by. Basically, I was willing to spend our combined life savings for a goddamn door.

We knew we couldn’t afford a house in our neighborhood, though it didn’t stop us from looking at a few. But our budget capped around the $400,000 mark, roughly a million less than the going rate for South Brooklyn brownstones. We looked at houses further out, spending weekends pushing ourselves to the furthest limits of the borough. We saw dumpy little shotgun shacks located on the expressway, places with termites and noisy neighbors who eyed us suspiciously as we filed optimistically into open houses. We lowered our sights to condos and co-ops, our eyes glazing over at an astonishing array of identical cabinets and countertops contained within outrageously priced, dismal buildings in corners of the borough where the orange line doesn’t run.

And yet, every week it seemed some magazine article was still trumpeting the discovery of Brooklyn. Be not afraid, Manhattanites! they reassured. There are wine stores, and places to buy ironic T-shirts! If it’s good enough for Steve Buscemi, you can handle it, too! But when Heath Ledger is buying a $3 million brownstone in your hood and housing prices go up 35 percent in one year, maybe it’s time to rethink the whole poor-relation shtick. There was a time when living in Brooklyn seemed like a radical step. But like independent films and Ikea, the alternative was rapidly morphing into the big-budget mainstream.

“Call me when you’re ready to look in Montclair,” a friend had said. “All the Broadway people live in Maplewood now,” my husband’s co-worker had crowed. But we didn’t want to go. We’re the kind of people whose quality of life directly correlates with our ability to run out and buy individually wrapped fig bars at 2 a.m. We were Brooklynites, true and true, as my 718-bred daughters say it. We clung to our self-image as borough-dwelling renegades, even as a condo with single units going for a million plus slowly rose a block away.

We knew we couldn’t handle the suburbs, but when the local papers began trumpeting shiny new developments in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, we realized our days here were numbered. We had combed from Prospect Heights to Greenwood Heights and never felt the slightest tug of connection. We had pondered the hype of Bushwick as the next big thing, but reconsidered when we saw the public-school test scores. We had gone to Sunset Park and Midwood, only to find ourselves staring at sad patches on the highway that were all our money could buy. All we wanted was to throw all our money into someplace not completely hovel-like, in a neighborhood we could venture out with relative assurance we wouldn’t get shot. Or worse, be bored. And now that the last scraps of land on the borough were on the block, we’d come to the end of the line. Nowhere to go but the Atlantic.

So instead, we did the only thing you can when you reach the edge: We turned in the other direction. One Saturday, we dragged ourselves to the furthest end of Manhattan and got out of the train at the very last stop. We found a dismal strip of Broadway dotted with dollar stores and Dunkin’ Donuts. But we also found, to our great surprise, dramatically sloping streets, blocks and blocks of lovely old apartment buildings, and a heart-stoppingly beautiful park, full of caves and woods and marshes. Inwood lacks the pristine grandeur and Zagat Guide destinations of our current habitat. Instead, it has a ragged charm that seduced us instantly. I used to think the city stopped somewhere around Columbia Presbyterian. I was thrilled to be wrong.

It was not a smooth search. Our budget still couldn’t carry us into “sprawling” or “sun-drenched” territory, even there. Noise was a factor. Fixer-uppers were not uncommon. And the standard-issue second bedrooms in most units were roughly the dimensions of something out of Prison Break. One realtor, with a 900-square-foot apartment to sell, informed me, “Your children would grow to hate you if you put them here.” Yet of all the reasons I’ve ever heard for hating your parents, being raised in New York isn’t one of them. We kept looking. And then we stopped.

The apartment is smaller. I’ll lose my middle-room office and have to get rid of a ton of our possessions. My daughters will no longer have sunlight streaming in through their bedroom windows. We still have to pass the co-op board. There’s no Starbucks, no Barnes & Noble, no theater, no gourmet shop where Dutch cheese is called “how-dah.” I have broken out in rashes trying to figure out the schools. And the A train ride to Century 21 is sufficiently long enough to merit meal service and a movie. It is, in many ways, a highly impractical choice. But then, falling in love usually is.

A few yards away from the spot I hope to call home in a few months, there’s a rock. On it is a plaque commemorating the alleged spot where, in 1626, Peter Minuit purchased the island of Manhattan. The location, it seems, is an auspicious one for real-estate transactions. For less than the cost of a handyman special in Flatbush, I’m going to live in a two-bedroom prewar apartment on a park in Manhattan, and that’s not too shabby. It’s like getting turned down by the community college and finding out you can go to Oxford.

If we’d left and gone to West Orange, we’d be home now. But that wasn’t going to happen; we’re city people through and through. I’ll have to redefine my self-image as a trailblazing Brooklynite, but that’s O.K. My husband says we can think of Inwood as “Manhattan with an asterisk.” And while I love that the forest will be at my doorstep, I love that there’s a deli around the corner (right near the secondhand shop selling leopard-print coats) even more. Because, for me, the only thing harder than finding a home in New York City was the thought of ever living anywhere else.

Like most urban parents, the sleep of our children is a fragile, easily disturbed and deeply precious commodity. There are few things in life we cling to with such desperation as that brief window of time each night after our kids conk out but before we go to bed. We have neighbors who live with their twins in a one-bedroom and sleep on a futon, colleagues whose erratic schedules made hooking up a challenge even before they had kids. They say every child is a miracle. Now I know that's because sex is damn near impossible.

Our place isn't large, and the floor plan is open, so even a low-volume conversation in the back reverberates to the front. Spooked just sitting in the living room talking or watching a movie, we're flat-out petrified at anything requiring somewhat more enthusiastic noise, or the ill-timed squeak of a bedspring. We confine our lovemaking to the maximum quiet and dark we can muster. It's mostly because we're just not the sort of parents who ever want their kids to have the vaguest idea they have a sex life-but also because if, God forbid, we were to wake them, we'd never get laid.

Romantic spontaneity went out the window right around the time our elder daughter was 6 weeks old and I got the thumbs-up from my doctor to resume sex. The hormonally horny creature I'd been throughout pregnancy was already gone, replaced by a sleep-deprived woman with sagging belly, leaky rack and below-the-waist disaster zone. Nevertheless, I've always been a plucky, up-for-anything sort, and I figured I could put aside my recuperative blahs long enough to get back on the road to wanton sex goddess. A short time and few less articles of clothing later, I realized there was one small factor I hadn't considered-something that screamed a lot and dozed in 20-minute bursts.

A couple of years and another child later, sex is as calculated an aspect of life as RSVP-ing to birthday-party invitations. My mate and I look at our calendars before plotting out when we might have any energy. We plan for a night, have an extra cup of coffee in the afternoon, and cross our fingers that the kids go down soundly at their appointed bedtime. Then, a while later, we stealthily crawl under the covers for a brief grope fest and hope any ominous thumping from the crib doesn't erupt into a full-blown wail.

It hasn't been an easy adjustment. I'm not one who enjoys uncertainty. I prefer my Mr. Coffee machine to wondering if there's going to be a line at Starbucks. Similarly, I was never into dating and the agita of never knowing where my next roll in the hay was coming from. I was delighted when my husband and I moved in together. Booty on demand-it was better than cable. We could spend whole weekend mornings lolling in bed together. We could set an evening mood with a few candles and a little Isaac Hayes. Now we've gone from "Shaft" to shhhhh. The threat of discovery may be sexy when you're trysting in the bathroom of some club, but it's a stone-cold libido killer when you're in your own home.

Reliable seduction has become, like sleep and a wardrobe unstained by applesauce, a luxury I can no longer afford. So I've adapted. I don't need an aromatherapy massage, a bubble bath for two or a roaring fireplace. Flimsy lingerie? Who even sees it? That stuff all strikes me as hopelessly girlie now. Instead, I've become as efficiently goal-oriented as any guy. Where once I could offer a coy come-on or a teasing promise of things to come, my repertoire of dirty talk now consists of a single phrase: "Make it snappy."

When he was still at his old job, my husband was able to take the occasional day off, or sometimes just nip home for a nooner while the kids were out of the house. Even then we had to contend with our largely stay-at-home neighbors clomping through the halls, reminding us of the acoustic limitations of our dwelling. Do I feel super-erotic when there's a loud squabble in the stairwell about who didn't recycle their beer bottles? Not so much.

I can't remember the last time my mate and I were truly alone. The relentless exhaustion of working and parenting takes its toll, but I sometimes think that if only we had a real room, a place with a door and no need for a noise machine and no one else sharing it, I might actually feel a little more like the contented little sexpot I once fancied myself. When I entertain vague fantasies about leaving our cramped quarters and buying a house, I get hot thinking about how we could have more sex-that, and a washing machine. Hell, we could have sex on the washing machine.

But instead we remain here, quietly scoping out the Lowes and wondering if our landlord would raise an eyebrow if she saw us hauling lumber and doorknobs in. And we bide our time, nodding our heads sagely when the old folks in the neighborhood look at our chubby-cheeked offspring and sigh that it all goes so fast. That's the attitude I'm going with. It's just 17 years till they're in college. And if, by then, we creak when we go at it, at least I won't have to worry about the noise.

My stint in the parochial system was spent on the other side of the river, in Jersey City and Hoboken, where an enduring legacy of lackluster public schools continues to keep the Catholic institutions aloft. Growing up, the schools were local characters in and of themselves, tough guys with nicknames like St. Al, St. Dom, St. Nick. My family sent me to them in part because they wanted me to become a pious, virtuous young lady. They also wanted me to have the kind of functioning literacy and grasp on basic math that public school might not guarantee.

There, Catholic schools weren't merely for the offspring of rosary-clutching madonnas with a stash of holy water in the house; they were for anybody concerned about the ass kickings that were a more common sight in our numerically named counterparts. Half the kids I went to school with weren't even Catholic. We just came from families that preferred the scariest person in the classroom to be wearing a wimple. If eventually I bonded with a girl named Jeannie Weinstein, it wasn't over a mutual love of Jesus, but a comrades-in-arms fear of the assistant principal. And what I didn't realize at the time was that the camaraderie would stay with me and my tartan-clad kin the rest of our lives.

To be a Catholic-school veteran is to never be truly alone. It's a membership in an elite, dysfunctional family-a fine addition to the dysfunctional families most of us already belong to. It means you can bicker with someone you've just met over whose nuns were the toughest. You can discuss the merits of a giant wall crucifix as an anti-cheating device. And you can bask in your glory days on the liturgy committee.

If you're a man, Catholic school has probably provided endless inspiration for your punk band, for the quirky independent film you financed on your credit card, or for your stand-up act. Last week, I was in an audience when the comedian onstage spotted my red hair and asked my name. When I told him, he hooted to the audience: "Catholic girl? You need to get laaaiiiid!" What would a poor guy like that be doing for jokes if not for people like me?

Which brings me to another point: If you're female, convent school is the greatest pickup device ever. The phrase "I went to an all-girl Catholic academy" is universally translated as "I'm a freak." My eight years of religious education may have been cruel and often grueling, but they paid for themselves in getting me action. You want to take away Catholic schools? O.K., but don't come crying to me in 20 years when you have to go tapping the Mormon states to find the kind of girls who can give you something to repent about.

Catholic school is a legacy that stays with you for life. Years in uniform left me sartorially crippled for most of the 80's, and I'm still paralyzed when confronted with my school colors. But today another part of me embraces the whole Peter-Pan-collars-and-blazers-with crests megillah. Even now, when I return to my hometown, I know to tread carefully when I pass a girl with her plaid skirt rolled up to butt-skimming levels, because I know how tough those girls can be. And when I see the boys running screaming down my own street every afternoon at 3, loosening their little ties, I make a quiet note to myself of who to keep my daughters away from in a few years.

That's the power of the uniform: It's a social leveler, it's your gang colors, and it is, of course, a fetish object par excellence. Could Britney Spears have launched a career if she'd strutted down that hallway in regulation public-school jeans and T-shirt? Au contraire. When I once mentioned to a man that I still had my high-school uniform and my old candy-striper garb, he hopefully inquired if I'd ever also been a storm trooper.

Whether the doors are officially locked for good or not, the Catholic schools I once knew are already gone. Priests who resented saying Mass in English, and punishment-junkie nuns with names like Sister Davita, Sister Veronice and Sister Maristella, are long dead, replaced by a more easygoing generation of lay teachers. Yet much of what I learned in Catholic school stays with me, and much of it actually goes beyond an appreciation of Virgin Mary night lights and an aversion to Mel Gibson opuses. To hear "love thy neighbor" and "turn the other cheek" every day for years is to be prepared forever to brave the F train and the bagel line without totally blowing a gasket. To wear a uniform means to not be fooled by Vogue or Lucky-it is to know unshakably that plaid and pleats make you look fat, girlfriend.

We can blame the decline of the Catholic schools on any number of things: population shifts, predatory priests, a loosened grip on our overall piety. They certainly all contributed to my decision not to send my daughters there, despite being charmed by a girl named Catalina who took me around St. Charles Borromeo and beamed as she spoke about her school and her teachers. And I'm fortunate that my district is teeming with other options. I wouldn't want to be a parent in one of the several less desirable areas now facing the prospect of sending my kid to the overcrowded, underperforming local public institution.

Catholic school may have given me an enduring cynicism about the Crusades, and a piece of lead in my knuckle from where Jeanette Samra stabbed me in our own holy war. Yet when I think of our city streets wiped free of the image of identically clad, catechism-quoting children, it fills me with a certain nostalgic sadness, and it's not prurient or ironic at all. Because those kids are pure local color, in shades of blue and gold or burgundy and gray. They're a fuhgeddaboudit accent, the peal of church bells, they're St. Patrick's Day and San Gennaro. And we wouldn't be the same without them.

There’s a bit of Dr. Evil in the heart of every urban parent. We may love our children for everything that is unique, idiosyncratic and innocent about them, but deep down, what we really want are miniature, completely mature versions of our own bad-ass selves. My children are my world and my life, the seat of my soul and my reason for being. They are also my biggest, loudest, most prominent accessories. And if they don’t look cool, honey, I don’t look cool.

When our first child was born, a musician friend burned us a CD and called it Lullaby; it was composed entirely of reggae tunes. My heart swells with pride every time my 4-year-old considers the distance to a destination and asks, "Can’t we just take a cab?" She wears T-shirts emblazoned with "Anarchy in the Pre-K," boasts that City Bakery has the best hot chocolate and sings along with They Might Be Giants and Avenue Q. Her baby sister sports little black onesies and has recently developed a penchant for tamago. Some of their sophisticated inclinations, I know, are encoded in their Gotham-dwelling DNA. And some, I reluctantly admit, are the result of their pushy parents.

My husband and I live in a home blessedly free of many of the average American accouterments of childhood, studiously steering our rug rats toward what we consider acceptable outlets. Japanese party puss Hello Kitty? Yes. The Wiggles? Oh, noooo. Pre-ordering Pee-wee’s Playhouse on DVD? Party on. Veggie Tales? You’ve got to be kidding me. When their inevitable adolescent rebellions occur, they won’t involve piercings or angry poetry. No, my daughters will wind up embracing the Olive Garden, smooth jazz and natural hair color.

The world of children is soft and fuzzy, robed in pastels and set to the tune of "I love you, you love me." In short, it’s the antithesis of everything being a New Yorker stands for. So we compensate. We shoehorn ourselves into an apartment the size of our suburban friends’ decks, ostensibly so we can expose our offspring to every cultural marvel the city offers, but also to ensure they grow up savvier, more sophisticated and, well, edgier than their mall-prowling counterparts. And we’re not alone.

A friend’s twins recently visited family in the Midwest, where they promptly snubbed the average white bread their relations offered. Their predilection for artisinal sourdough is already too pronounced. A neighbor’s 3-year-old confidently refers to her mother’s jewelry as "bling-bling." And there’s a preschooler in my hood with a mohawk. Even more than we pride ourselves on our progeny’s gross motor developments or mastery of French nursery rhymes, my fellow breeders and I brag of our children’s savoir-faire. Parents share tales on the playground of young Talullah’s addiction to edamame, or how Duncan loved the Metallica documentary. And we keep our kids’ vices—a fondness for Care Bears or American cheese—conspicuously overlooked.

The challenge is figuring out how to maintain our hard-won blasé attitudes while not completely overwhelming our children’s artless enthusiasm. My kids find the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty utterly mesmerizing, and so, for the first time in ages, do I. They let me get romantic about the city again, and I adore them for it. More difficult is accepting their inclinations toward everything that is crassly, crappily kid-oriented, the things that send a shudder down the spine of every self-respecting hipster. What am I to do when an out-of-town relation sends the girls gag-reflex-triggering matching ensembles that are a riot of pink, lace and bows? I can only pretend it’s an 80’s Lacroix homage so much. My mother recently gave my elder daughter a huge dress-up box. I console myself that in her silver tutu and pink marabou boa, she looks like a meatpacking-district tranny.

But I’m trying to recognize when my ego starts butting against not merely the inclinations of my brood, but the enjoyment of my fellow adults. Because it’s pretty easy to be a real tool. At the recent Elvis Costello show, a single friend spotted parents in the crowd waving their toddlers like oversized lighters. People, I’m a mother myself and I say to you: Hire a damn sitter. The kids can have an Almost Blue period when they’re 7 or 8. No one who hasn’t yet mastered continence honestly wants to go to the gig. And the other people in the audience, who just turned over half a paycheck to Ticketmaster, are now hating not just you and yours, but everyone within three area codes who’s had the audacity to reproduce.

Yet I sympathize with those baby-brandishers. Behind every leather-clad toddler stumbling around Jivamukti, there’s a tattooed ex–club kid convinced that the moment they start favoring Barney over Barney’s, they’re going to move to New Jersey, get fat and die. The scariest thing about parenting is that we’re all pretty much making it up as we go along. And it’s hard to hang on to one’s edge while holding on to a baby.

I believe if God hadn’t meant for my daughters to be attired in Moschino, He would not have their toddler line discounted at Century 21. And I want to beat up the newspaper-reading jackass who glares at my children the moment we walk into Starbucks. My baby will learn, as her sister did, her letters and numbers from riding on the subway. But I also know that an ironic T-shirt doesn’t make much of a statement on someone who can’t read. And that maybe my elder daughter isn’t absorbing all my best maternal behavior when she bellows at a restaurant, "I need a new freaking spoon … please?"

In a city of eight million people, not everyone at every moment is going to throw their arms open for me and my adorable, pooping, squealing, hissy-fit-throwing entourage, no matter how hard I’m trying to make them blend in. So that won’t be us making your life hell at the 10 p.m. showing at the Angelika. But it might be us among the early diners at Superfine, scoping for the nearest exit and choking down a few bites before someone blows a gasket. If you see us, cut us a little slack. We’re not trying to be your buzzkill. We’re just trying to avoid the birthday-party crowd at Chuck E. Cheese.

I started going on school tours when my elder daughter was still in diapers. It's something of a recreational event in my Brooklyn neighborhood, along with community-center workshops with names like "Navigating District 15." Here in our hotbed of fertility on the Gowanus, where Maclaren gridlock is a common post-playground hazard, we're rich in high-performing schools. We have magnet schools and lottery schools. We have schools with gifted programs and inclusion programs. We have half-day programs and full-day programs and after-school programs and two kinds of math. But debate over the quality rages, and now, as my child finally approaches pre-kindergarten, I still don't know if we're blessed with a dazzling assortment of educational options or locked into a fate determined solely by where the Con Ed bill goes.

Among parents on the playground, "What's your school?" is what passes for introduction, along with "Is that your child eating dirt over there?" Responses are met with enthusiastic smiles or sympathetic nods. Cobble Hill's genteel P.S. 29 invokes hushed awe, while Boerum Hill's grittier P.S. 32 invites a gentle "Oh. Well. That's good, too." And a rumor of cutbacks or staff changes can set off ripples of panic and a flurry of variance applications.

I have a particular eye for parents of older children, probing them about how they're faring. A preschool teacher with a son at P.S. 261 enthuses about their after-school program. "They have everything!" she gushes. "Cooking! Chess! Gypsy dancing!" I'm still calculating how all this will look on my daughter's Dartmouth application when she adds, "But I have to tutor him for math." And suddenly I see my child as just another hoofer in a scarf skirt who can't do long division.

A friend with a child at P.S. 38 admits it has a less-than-stellar reputation but encourages me to apply for its gifted program. Unfortunately, I'm the only mother in New York who doesn't think her child is gifted. And it's not just because her preschool teacher recently caught her stuffing Play-Doh in her underpants. Another colleague conspiratorially assures she can get me a variance for a hot school. I am horrified and intrigued. I want to believe the system is an incorruptible lottery, but I'm also flushed at the notion of pulling some strings to gain an admission, just like the big boys do at the 25-grand-a-year places.

I don't limit my quest for the perfect school to interrogating fellow parents, though. I cruise birthday parties and Dan Zanes concerts, sizing up my daughter's potential classmates. I ask well-scrubbed prodigies and hockey-stick-wielding little thugs alike where they go to school, in the hopes of determining some kind of demographic data I can later turn into a pie chart.

I do the same with real-estate listings-before checking out a potential new residence, I'm MapQuesting my ass off to determine the local school.

The mania I feel is acute, extreme and comfortingly common. Parents move in ever-narrowing circles of matricular desire. If you're in District 15, you want to be zoned for P.S. 29, and if you're zoned for P.S. 29, you want to be wait-listed for Tribeca. I know at least two families who have started having their utility bills sent to addresses where neither their heat nor electricity actually go, in the hope of establishing residence and getting their kids into more desirable schools. I know a mom who volunteers at another, on the chance it might somehow sway a variance. This is the same woman who, when I mentioned that I was applying there, informed me it was hopeless and I should give up. "They're only issuing two for the fall," she declared ominously, "and I really think Stewart is going to get one of them." I smiled indulgently and thought, "Bring it on." I find myself lately fully determined to get that variance, if only to stick it to Stewart and his folks. Great-my firstborn's early education is now riding on her mother's bottomless appetite for one-upmanship.

The thing about living here is that an inability to afford private school in no way diminishes anyone's arrogance or sense of entitlement. At school open houses, prospective parents grill the staff relentlessly on their policies and philosophies. A dad at a P.S. 58 tour takes umbrage with the school's tradition of saying the pledge of allegiance, questions how competitive the play in phys-ed class is, and nervously speculates that the students' lunchtime mantra of " Bon appetit , let's eat!" sounds suspiciously like prayer. Another questions what the science curriculum is-for the pre-K. I look forward to his daughter splitting atoms at the sand table come fall.

In schools more generally accepted to be All That, the tables are turned. At the New School, a homeroom teacher firmly states that parents who have problems with their policies can go elsewhere. And at another open house, the principal asks the parents from outside the zone to identify themselves, provoking awkward hand-raising from the stigmatized hopeful and a pitying admonition that they probably won't be accommodated.

My daughter remains blissfully unaware of my angst. In order to secure a variance for P.S. 261, the "Magnet School for Integrating the Arts," we have a mandatory play visit scheduled. I have no idea what's expected of us when we go. I only know that I'm gripped with a silent terror of screwing it up. When I took her to register at the school we are zoned for, my daughter was more interested in trying to visit her friend Leo's classroom than inquiring about the new Spanish program.

But frankly, I found myself warming to the easy proximity to our apartment, especially as I maneuvered my squalling 3-month-old around the facilities. All my going on tours and indexing math and reading reports and, ultimately, the deciding factor may simply wind up being convenience. For years I'd dismissed the school, based largely on the example of a surly neighbor kid who goes there, whose creed in life is: "It don't matter." But as my daughter sat in the office, the secretary took an illustrated edition of The Wind in the Willows off her desk and handed it to her. "A little welcome present," she said. My daughter beamed, and I felt something click into place. It occurred to me that even in Brooklyn, the path of least resistance may actually lead to the palace of wisdom. And even if you can't buy your way into the system, all it takes is one small gesture and you can win me.

My husband and I decided to become homeowners last spring, the same time we decided to try to have a second child. We approached the new stage of our lives with gusto. Conception turned out to be remarkably easy and reliably enjoyable. Then came house-hunting. Interest rates, friends and bank ads reminded us, are at an all-time low. Surely that would compensate somewhat for the fact that housing prices themselves remain at a mind-bending high?

Buoyed by the triumphal sagas of our home-owning friends-rock-bottom-priced fixer-uppers, condos that later tripled in value-we quickly obtained our credit reports and a mortgage broker. We may be the kind of academic, artsy people whose incomes don't quite jibe with their pretensions, but we considered ourselves a typical middle-class family, with a little under half a million to spend-more if we went for a place with rental income.

We knew we couldn't afford Manhattan, and I'd already informed my mate that if he tried moving me to the suburbs, I was going to start drinking and having affairs. Ideally, we'd stay in our modest, comfortable Carroll Gardens neighborhood.

It's easy to see why it's desirable: rows of stately brownstones, a lively playground, an up-and-coming elementary school, hip restaurants and shops on Smith Street, easy F-train access. Still, the area retains a gritty je ne sais quoi we hoped would translate into affordability. It's a place where cigarette-smoking grandmothers in housecoats yell out the window when dinner is ready, where the pork store is guarded by an oversized, apron-wearing plastic pig.

Call us naïve: We just hadn't banked on $1.75 million price tags on houses with plaster front-lawn Virgin Marys.

Our salvation, I decided, would be to find a rundown home with "good bones" and a low price. I pestered an agent for days when I saw a sign in his window advertising a two-family home "with details" that "needs work" for $575K. The details included a basement with no boiler, just an intricate labyrinth of rotting pipes. The walls on the owner's duplex were wet and peeling from leaks of mysterious origin. I looked out in the yard and saw something small and furry darting through waist-high grass. The tenant upstairs indicated she wouldn't allow us in, but it was hard to make out what she was saying above the basso profundo din of her dog. Lesson No. 1: There's always a dog. It will bark menacingly the entire time you're looking, and it will be named Happy.

We looked at a windowless duplex on Court Street for just under half a million. We looked at a small condo with a fully mirrored living room and bedroom that sat directly on the B.Q.E. for the same price. I stopped by a house near the Gowanus Canal going for $625K. The ad was addressed to "someone with patience and vision." The front sidewalk was entirely occupied by an overgrown tree. A neighbor came by and said, "That house? Nobody's lived there for 25 years. They say there are mushrooms growing inside." I've gone so far as to harass the city about an abandoned brownstone on President Street, only to discover that the owner, disappointingly, still pays taxes on it.

We came close to bidding on a 750-square-foot co-op for the bargain price of $350K, until my husband had an anxiety attack. The owners had two children, and the kids' room could barely fit a bunk bed and small chest of drawers. It was too much, or rather too little, for a man from Westchester.

Lesson No. 2: "Recently renovated" is real-estate code for "architectural assault and battery." Someone at Home Depot is laughing cruelly as they issue the same ersatz-wood kitchen cabinetry to every potential seller in the County of Kings. Somewhere, someone is adding a "Florida room" and a fiberboard drop ceiling. Somewhere, a yard is being cemented over, and the owner is smiling at how he's just upped the property value.

My hopes rose when I saw a two-family advertised on Wyckoff Street. It was on a pretty stretch of street bookended by housing projects. The asking price was $775K. It smelled of zoo. The ad had said it was a three-bedroom. But when I asked the realtor why I could only count two, he informed me he'd been including the bedroom in the rental unit.

We discovered that other neighborhoods we'd been quick to dismiss, like Park Slope (too crunchy), Fort Greene (too trendy), and Williamsburg (too New York Times Styles section), had almost nothing to offer in our price range, either. Lesson No. 3: The boy you think you're too good for doesn't like you anyway.

We started to look farther afield, within strict guidelines: not too far out, not inconvenient to public transportation and in no neighborhood that regularly appears on Live at Five in flames.

If the title hadn't already been taken, our story would by now be called Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. I saw a lumber nightmare in Windsor Terrace with wood-grain vinyl siding, dark blue paneling in every room and a pennant-shaped yard with a long drain pipe running through the length of it. "It's very low-maintenance," the realtor cooed. I looked at another in Windsor Terrace that had no eating space and one small bathroom downstairs from the bedrooms. This is a pregnant woman's worst-case scenario. "You could keep something near the bed," the realtor helpfully offered. "Like a jar?" I asked. I looked at a house in the South Slope described as a "cottage." The seller had miniaturized everything in it: the table for two in the kitchen, the love seat in the living room, the twin bed in the bedroom. "I want to live here!" my toddler declared. Sure she did-it was a dollhouse.

It wasn't long before my husband started begging off. My rock, my stalwart, my soulmate had started returning from viewings and sobbing himself into a deep sleep. My young daughter was enthusiastic about peeking into other people's homes-until I took her to five open houses in one day and she developed an accusatory case of scarlet fever. Now I go out on my own, and realtors love nothing more than an expectant lady waddling through the door. I reek of the desperation of a reality-dating-show contestant.

A friend whose kitchen can't accommodate anyone over size 12 despairs, "At what point do we give up and leave?" But I still prefer Prospect Park to a yard, great takeout over a dishwasher. My daughters will never say: "I grew up in New York, and I couldn't wait to run away somewhere interesting." So we stay. There's a vacant parking lot I recently saw advertised at $350K. I wonder what public school it's zoned for, and how close it is to the pork store.