Thursday, November 05, 2009

The longest day

Long distance trips continue to be challenging with a two year old at home - well, I suspect quite a bit more challenging for Meh with me gone, but still, I miss my family and want to be back home as soon as possible! So when I had business trips this and next week to London and Tokyo, I found myself diverging from coworkers, who mostly were doing one continuous trip, and instead booked some mildly abrupt itineraries to minimize the time away. Today was the tail end of trip number one, where I ended up spending less than 48 hours in London. Somehow this involved being booked on the very first flight of the day out of Heathrow terminal 4, which meant a 4 am GMT wakeup and a 4:20 am cab ride for a 6:20 am flight. On the plus side, I got home by early afternoon. On the minus side, I won't be home from teaching my class tonight until after 10 pm PST, which means 26 hours of being awake. And Zachary will likely be up at his usual 5:30 am tomorrow, so no recovery time in the forecast. Next week onward to Japan for a nearly-as-hectic repeat performance - eek!

We've been experimenting with "timeouts" for Zachary, mostly when he gets frustrated (or overly tired) and starts swinging his amrs in our direction and "hitting" us. The timeout generally just means sitting in a chair for a few minutes, talking to him about how we don't hit people, and then redirecting him to another activity. I'm not sure if this is a good sign or not, but Meh reported that in the midst of a mild tantrum yesterday, she asked him if he wanted a timeout, and he pulled out the chair and sat in it all by himself! Here's the tail end of his self-timeout:

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