The Art of Taking It Easy: How to Cope with Bears, Traffic, and the Rest of Life's Stressors

by Brian King

Usually the cities we tour are only a couple of hours apart, but we had an unusual situation when I was scheduled to speak at Rutgers University in New Jersey and again exactly one week later in Newport, Oregon, which, if I remember this correctly, is nowhere near New Jersey. To put even more strain on our travel, I scheduled a book signing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in between these speaking gigs. This gave us five days to drive over twenty-six hundred miles, which seemed really doable when I booked these gigs as a hardworking, hard-partying father of none. As we soon learned, two-month-old babies do not have a high tolerance for long drives. However, we adapted. Sarah invented an activity we called “truck stop tummy time” and on our third day, I noticed that we seemed to be stopping for diaper changes way too frequently. Because I am a research scientist at heart, I started keeping track of our “miles per diaper” and found that we were averaging about twenty-seven miles per Huggie. We were going through diapers faster than normal and at the rate we were stopping to change them, we were not going to make it to Oregon in time. Then it occurred to us that Alyssa’s brain may have learned that every time she let one go, we pulled over and Mommy would pull her out of the car seat. She got changed, but she also got company, which was probably more important to her. Her behavior was receiving both negative reinforcement (removing the soiled diaper) and positive reinforcement (...