Practice for daddy

I have an event on with work at the end of the month, so Tom is taking the day off work to be with Leo.

It's a Friday day and we have swimming and baby massage on a Friday, so Tom is hoping to take him to those. That's no problem, the issue is with the driving. As I have mentioned before, Leo is a little bit of a horror in the car and there is no hard and fast rule around managing that, so today was about Tom driving around as if I wasn't in the car and managing the situation by himself.

Leo has been a little better the past couple of days as far as being able to distract him with a squeaky toy to the point where he just grumbles rather than all out unleashes, so Tom got everything in the car and ready and off we went. We were going a little further than usual,  but he contained him well and no stop was required.. Coming home was a different story though!

He had slept whilst we were out and about and having some lunch, we made the mistake of letting him wake up and feed before travelling.

We had to stop 3 or 4 times along with numerous false starts and basically limped home.

Obviously Tom found this incredibly stressful and he felt that he did a terrible job.  He didn't, he did exactly what I would've done and there was no other way to manage it. I mostly kept my nose out as a method that works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another and my methods don't particularly work anyway! I was really proud of how patient and calm he stayed with Leo and we will just keep practicing until the day he has him. Worse case scenario is you don't make it out anywhere, but he will be absolutely fine.

This travelling issue we are having is incredibly stressful, but it is our job as parents to work with until the phase passes, however long that may be. We always plan around having to stop and as a rule I add half an hour contingency to most journeys. We won't ever go for big drives alone and if we really have to travel on our own a long way, we will go by train. 
There is no magic fix, just time. He will get to a point where he can entertain himself more efficiently and then hopefully he will grow out of it. We'll see