Intuition

The thing that gets me about this whole parenthood thing is the impreciseness of the whole thing. Try as I might to apply engineering principles to it, there seem to be few hard and fast rules of "when X happens, do Y". It seems a bit like quantum physics, like "when X happens there is a higher probability that Y will work, but it still might be 'Z', 'green' or 'Tuesday'". And if it was true last week, yesterday or even 15 minutes ago it's not necessarily the case right now. It's even harder than trying to figure out where Rebecca wants to go out to dinner.

The only weapon truly at our disposal as parents is intuition, and fortunately both Bec & I seem to be reasonably adept at this. In my case it's probably from years of trying to figure out where Bec wants to go to dinner. In Bec's case I don't know - maybe from trying to guess where her mom wants to go to dinner. Anyway I now have a stable of things I know how to do that might placate him, and I have a little experience now in associating some probabilities based on current conditions and recent events. I now seldom get to the end of my list without him quieting down - I don't know whether he just forgets what he was upset about or whether I got something right along the way but either way I won't argue with results. The only thing I know for sure though, is that you can never know anything for sure.