D+4: Timeout

I set up the "youth bed" for my daughter yesterday, and she napped in it like a pro. She slept in it perfectly last night.

Yesterday I also played some chess, and made dinner for my family while my lovely wife took the kids to a play date.

One of the things we do for my son is track his behavior on a chart. He has three metrics: Whether he woke us up in the night, whether he gives his teachers his attention at school when they need it, and whether he sits for dinner. Each metric is marked by a happy or sad face. If he gets four "perfect days" in any seven-day period, he gets some special reward, like an ice cream with mom, or a new battery in his toy train. The system has been in place for many months now. For about a week and a half he seemed to be testing the system to find out if he could get a reward by having no perfect days. The results came in, and then he started getting lots of perfect days. The little train has a battery in it now.

We give him timeouts when needed, and his little sister has always wanted a timeout of her own. She used to get up behind the gate on the stairs that we use to time him out behind, and beam happily while proclaiming that she was "timing out." The other day I had to give her a timeout for real, because she was playing with the gas knobs on the stove. It was her first real timeout, I think. She looked so proud it was as if she were graduating from Vassar. She set her face seriously, but her joy at this graduation was immense. When the timeout was over, she asked for another one.

Left grip is back up to 49 pounds (ALife: 45, 49, 45). Right grip is 90 (90, 87, 86) and inhale volume is back down to 4600 mL. I anticipate there will be daily ups and downs. We need to watch the overall trend.

Read it now, before the Yahoo shuffle makes the link break.