Lapse of Sanity: Learning to Love Again

I should be working on polisci, but after cleaning up ANOTHER mess, I needed to take a short mental break. See, I've been working non-stop, * READING non-stop * for 2 weeks straight (yes, even before school began for me). Part of this is due to my secret project (which is hardly a secret anymore) and the other part is a heavy reading course load this semester. To this I've tacked on Lambda Pi Eta President (requires handbook reading/organizing), a work/study (no reading yet, but it's coming), the usual Les Amis Francophones organizing, and some more stuff I'll remember later.

      I knew I had a lot of work to do, especially recovering from our trip to Thailand and our new re-arranging of the house and modem that took away my access to a quiet office. I'm already starting on losing ground it seems.... so I don't understand, for the life of me, why I would cave in and get a puppy!

    My readers will know that a big gaping hole was left in our hearts when Buddy (our dog of 7+ years) passed away at the end of Spring semester. It was heartbreaking watching him die and lonely once he was gone. I swore that we wouldn't rush to replace him... dogs need love and attention. I swore we wouldn't get a puppy... puppies need EXTRA love and attention. But those things we insist we will never do, we always seem to get into rather quickly.

     I wasn't the one that started moping for a dog. Mr. V "missed having his face licked..." but then we started getting emails about dogs that needed homes through our H.O.A. network. There was an uncanny number of Buddy's that passed through my email box, a few wirey terriers, some pits... and then there was Bentley.

After a long conversation Friday morning, my husband and I had finally decided: NO DOG...  We were on the same page with this one, but after I showed him the email with Bentley's photo... I said "let's just call and see." And then we came home with a puppy; a twelve week old, massive, heavy-pawed, all boy kind of puppy. We have officially named him General Bentley Beauregard (after a Facebook Poll of names), though he goes by Beau for short.

     I KNOW Bentley's going to be a great dog for our family. I knew it when I saw the picture. The problem with any relationship (canine or otherwise) is that it takes time. We didn't love Buddy the same way when we first met him, we had to get to know him (though he didn't pee on the carpet quite so much as Beau does). So, I'm stuck looking at this adorable fluffball thinking "why can't you behave yourself?" I can't seem to teach the kids how to behave with him either. They never had a puppy (Buddy was 3-5 when we got him and my baby girl wasn't even born then). So life is chaotic. I have to plan trips around the dog's bladder (and like I said, he goes a LOT because he drinks a LOT, because he's excited a LOT). I have extra messes to clean from all the stuff he's chewing,and more lessons to teach at home because we have to remember not to scream, run, hit, bang, etc at the dog... and we have to remember the dog is going to do most of those things to us because he's a young dumb boy.

Mostly I'm wondering what the heck I was thinking... but in my heart I know that's a rhetorical question. Someone told me once: "You know when your family isn't whole. That's why families accept new babies, puppies, friends... because they need to be in your life."

Wish me luck, things just got crazier!