Separation is where you see if it works better with the adults in two different homes.

When in doubt, respond to what you witness, not what you hear secondhand.

For me, the greatest source of frustration was trying to work with a willful child when there was something else I wanted - say, to get the child to go to bed so I could have my own time. Just the promise of the time, and feeling that promise slip away, was enough to introduce a whole other element of stress into the encounter.

All of us assign different values to things, and not all of those values are going to line up with others'.

When you are stuck in a group of people who merely trade turns at talking about themselves instead of actually conversing, it could be a matter of their not really knowing how to converse as opposed to being too small-minded or excessively Facebooked.

Being highly invested and preoccupied by an emotionally consuming mission tends to steal resources from other aspects of your emotional life.

I realize that people fly with small children all the time, and that babies are easier in some ways because all they do is sit/lie around anyway, but damn it's hard to keep a baby comfortable on any flight, much less a long one, particularly amid the looks of horror they will get from fellow passengers as it dawns on them that their 10- to 13-hour flight might come with a soundtrack of screaming baby.