Though I lived in quaint college towns in Indiana for the first 22 years of my life, I've always considered myself a city person. After graduating, I spent the next decade in New York, Washington DC, and, finally, Chicago, embracing all the opportunity, excitement, and craziness that come from life in a big city. (I affectionately labeled my last neighborhood the "intersection between hipster and homeless," and it was pretty much true.) The good, bad, and ugly of the city? I loved pretty much every minute of it.
And then my husband and I had our first child, bringing her home to our cozy fourth-floor walk-up. Suddenly, the drunken fights we occasionally heard in our alley, the morning dog walks down four flights of stairs, the lack of storage space, and my husband's two-hour daily commute to his job in the suburbs all seemed a bit ridiculous. Four months later, we were officially suburbanites, living 45 minutes away from our former big-city home. While my husband and I often reminiscence about our time living in Chicago (the food alone is worthy of some serious nostalgia), we both feel like the burbs have the city beat when you're a parent of little kids. Here's why.