Have your office in the second floor, with a trap door (at the entrance) that opens into a slide that delivers the child (or spouse) back to the first floor.

There's some wonderfully hilarious imagery in that sentence.

Heh, I'm hoping that by the time she has the strength and dexterity to open the gate at the bottom of the stairs that she'll also have the cognitive ability to understand "Daddy's working".

Mine has both... (At two.) it's v difficult to deal with "not work, daddy, come play. Come play!"

I get the knocking at the door plus "Daddy. Daddy." My wife taught our 18 month old to do just that. It's sweet, but completely distracting and disruptive to the point where on days I could have worked at home, I need to head into the office to get any flow going.