Another Trip Around the Sun 🎈

Another trip around the sun complete. 🎈

This is my 4th w/o my mom but this year feels different. There’s less daydreaming about what she would have done & a lot more comparing. I’m genuinely not sure if it’s because i’m old or just care even less about my birthday than i already did. At my age my mom had 3 kids, a career and the house i grew up in. Meanwhile, i’m over here with my herd of dogs playing dress-up. 😳

Many people have kindly asked how school is going so here’s a little update on that: I got lucky and was able to coast through the first few weeks but there are definitely moments of panic trying to figure out “am i supposed to remember this? Because i totally do not.” & then trying to refresh my memory on top of learning new material. Once i found my major, undergrad was a breeze for me so I can’t tell if this is way harder or if i’m simply out of practice, probably both. Even so, it wasn’t until this week that i started feeling the stress. I also prefer to blend in, meet people organically -not as the grief-stricken dog lady- but social media (mainly tiktok) has foiled that plan for me with at least a couple people in my cohort. The whole thing is just so weird to me. This past Thursday on my way home from class a car blew through a red light, missing me by inches at best. I arrived home 30 seconds later to a mess and in my flustered state had a major horrible dog mom fail. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Oliver has what i call “little man syndrome” he doesn’t like feeling cornered by the bigger males so we generally try to give him his own space. Well, in my frantic running around i thought i had put him in the outdoor pen prior to sending Storm out to go putty & getting to work on cleaning but apparently i had not. I returned 10 mins later to find them both in Storm’s open crate, directly next to crated Duncan, all just refusing to look at each other. Their interaction was brief (according to our security cams) and they both immediately sought out their “safe space”… Storm’s crate was just the closest option with an open door. Moral of the story, someone saved my butt twice that day & i’m praying they can get me through grad school too.🙏