What it would it look like if our blog series The Year of Living Car-lessly and Sustainababy had, well, a baby? Probably something like this post I came across last week over on Bus Chick—the blog of a Seattle mom who’s decided to live without a car. Here’s what happens when Bus Chick’s baby, Chicklet, gets sick in the middle of the night:

At 2 AM Saturday morning, Chicklet woke up with a fever of over 104. After calling our insurance hotline and talking with an on-call nurse and doctor, we decided to take her to the emergency room. Even if the bus had been running at that hour, walking and waiting were out of the question, and there were no Zipcars available in our neighborhood. So, we settled for option three—a cab—and were sitting in the Swedish ER within 15 minutes of the call.

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The prospect of emergency-illness situations like this was one of the few issues that gave me pause when planning for car-free parenthood. Nerd and I both knew that we’d remain car-free when we had kids and that we’d do whatever was necessary to make it work, but from the beginning, I’ve felt anxiety about how we would handle the inevitable medical emergencies that seem to arise with small children.

Read the rest of the post here.

It’s a nice reminder that the drawbacks of living carlessly are real—but also that they’re not all that difficult to overcome. If you choose your neighborhood carefully, you can live car-free and still make it to the emergency room in 15 minutes.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user bitzcelt under a Creative Commons license.