There is what I would call an ideal, yes, but what you
personally should do is subject to your particular constraints, what you can afford to do, and so on. As you hint, the poor do no have the luxury of choosing between various options that may be available to those better off. But if you do have the option, as you claim to have, then there is an objectively better choice.
During the early years of a child's life, the mother's constant presence is more important than the father's. This is not to downplay the paternal role, only to highlight that the maternal role has an especially important role to play during a child's early years, biologically, emotionally, and so on. If you can afford to do it, I would say that it would be best for your wife to leave her job and devote her time toward her children. She can return after they've all reached a certain age, though we should stop being so monomaniacally career focused, especially in the US. Children are entitled to such care, and so there is an obligation to give it to them, provided you can give it to them.
As children get older, the paternal role becomes more important. Again, this is not to suggest that fathers don't matter in the early years, or that mothers don't matter later on. They absolutely do. But the needs of a child in those early years depends more immediately and constantly on the mother. As children get older, the father becomes increasingly important as a figure of authority and maturation. If you observe children, you will see that how they relate to men and women differs. Children can intuitively grasp sex differences readily. Fathers play a greater role in teaching discipline and ushering children into the public sphere and the like.
I wish you the best. Too often children are given secondary importance, but we fail to realize that being a mother or father in some capacity (even if adoptive, or in some spiritual sense, as we see among, e.g., Catholic religious, if the biological option is closed to you by choice or by condition) is the height of human existence and purpose. Nothing else really makes sense unless that is recognized. A person never reaches adulthood until her becomes a parent, in some sense. He or she are perpetually trapped in childhood. Self-indulgence is much more common.