The alarm made its appearance shortly after 6 this morning in my Edgewater home. After convincing my lower back that it wasn't nearly as stiff as it claimed to be I lurched to the kitchen to reclaim silence.

Six ounces of formula did the trick as the alarm, otherwise known as my 10-month-old son Lucas, quietly experienced the elixir of a liquid breakfast.

There's little I won't do for my family - whether it's waking up early, getting up in the middle of the night, or anything in between.

Take for instance my Saturday morning.

A little before 9am my wife and I crossed the threshold into the Francis Parker School at the corner of Clark and Belden in Lincoln Park to take a tour of one of Chicago's best-known independent schools. And for the next two hours we ambled through the hallways, walked in empty classrooms amid unused chairs, and were regaled with an inspiring narrative by our affable tour guide, the school's director of admissions.

One of the challenges of living in Chicago with school age (or soon to be) kids is where you send them to school.

Congratulations to those of you on Chicago's north side adjacent to the lakefront if you're blessed by the gods of the boundary line and live within the geographic swath of excellent public schools like Lakeview's Blaine or Roscoe Village's Bell.

But if not, and if you intend not to ditch the city for the suburbs, prepare to join a disparate group of beings united simply by the presence in their lives of two and three year old kids. And get ready to go from school to school for tours with the unstated but understood intention of getting your kids in the best program without consuming too much of a percentage of your income.

Ah, but therein lies the rub. How do you define the best program?

• The school with the chatty volunteers who talked about getting together for margaritas while their kids banged heads in the basement?
• Or the school that offers Chinese Mandarin?
• Or the school that emphasizes an extensive writing curriculum?
• Or the school that costs more for one year than my university education did (all five years)?
• Or the school that has the best computer lab?
• Or the school that completely eschews computers in favor of organic knit clothing?
• Or the school with the best reading scores? The best math scores?

Oh the pressure of making the right choice! And like any momentous decision, this one is profoundly personal. We want our kids to be safe, to be happy, to be nurtured, to have every opportunity to succeed (without the headache and/or hassle of a bunch of little knuckleheads being raised by big knuckleheads).

At this point we have yet to reach a decision. Like most folks in our position we will draw up a short list and submit applications to several public schools and one or two private schools.

No matter what we do, though, it will be in Chicago. Because at the end of the day we are Chicagoans through and through. Sure, there are sacrifices we make by living here. We pay more for gas. We don't have yards. Sometimes traffic makes you feel like eating cardboard.

But at the end of the day, as well as the beginning, our lives are underpinned by the reality that we live in a world-class city with an amazing blend of peoples we want our kids to meet and know and experiences we will urge them to have.

But we have time for all of that as two-year-old Jackson is getting the hang of piecing together three word sentences and Lucas is just about to turn the corner on that walking thing.

The school question? Of course we want to nail it. Later this week we visit Bell. Maybe that's the one that will feel like home.

Whatever choice we make, though, it will be from the comfort of our home in Chicago.