When you stop by Al Di La at eight o’clock on a Sa­turday night, you don’t seriously expect to get a table any time soon. Still, when my husband and I inquired about how long the wait was on a recent weekend, we weren’t quite prepared for this response: “Well, we can’t guarantee you a table tonight,” they said, as if there was a possibility of sticking it out until tomorrow.

But while the idea of camping out in the wine bar for twelve hours before digging into a Northern Italian breakfast definitely had its appeal, our sitter needed to be home by midnight, so we went with plan B, a decent, though unremarkable, bistro a few blocks away. 

And so it goes for nearly all our decisions, major and minor, as a family. At the moment, my­ three-year-old is on three different waitlists—art classes at the Brooklyn Museum,  swim lessons at the Y, and acrobatics classes at LAVA—and by the end of this spring, I fully expect to her to be on several more, probably for our zoned pre-K as well as our first and second choice private preschools.

As a result of all of this waitlist jockeying, on any given day for as long as we live in Brooklyn, our kids will almost always be participating in some kind compromise or plan B—victims of my inability to…what? Get up at the crack of dawn on when registrations open to be among the first to sign up? Pay someone else to do this for us? Slip a fifty d­­ollar bill to the swim lessons director?  

When it comes to the extracurricular activities, I doubt it’d be worth it to step up my efforts. Whatever we’d all gain in classes more perfectly tailored to my daughters’ interests and precise napping schedules, we’d surely lose in much-needed early morning sleep—and fifty dollar bills.

Besides, it was only after we failed to snag a spot in ballet lessons that we discovered acrobatics in the first place—and that’s become one of my daughter’s favorite things to do. In fact, I doubt she would have liked ballet nearly as much.  

Schools, though, may be a different story. After all, there’s much more at stake than an hour or two of fun each week, especially once we start shopping for K through fives. Still, there might be some advantages to being forced into looking at alternatives. It only was when we heard that zoned families were getting waitlisted at our pre-K that we started seriously looking into other options—and in doing so we’ve discovered some really promising charter schools.

Right now our first choice is still our first, but you never know what the future will bring. This year’s ballet could be next year’s acrobatics. In the meantime, we’ll have to be content to put in some time on the waitlist. Now, if only someone could bring me a glass of wine until our name is called.