Babies Ain't Cheap
The average cost of raising a child from birth to four years is about $250 a week, according to a 2004 survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
They estimated that families making $70,200 a year or more spend a quarter of a million dollars on child from birth through age 17. The survey interviewed and visited 5,000 households four times a year.
This article on Money Central at MSN, which cites the survey, offers some general principles on keeping the costs down. The first and most compelling one is: don't buy more house. The bigger you buy, the more you'll pay. Make the most of what you have, and like many in hot real estate markets, consider remodeling and/or expanding instead of altogether moving.