The bark park

A few months ago, I had a laugh-out-loud moment reading an acquaintance’s Facebook status. It read: “In our greatest act of self-sabotage yet, we got a puppy!”

It resonated with me, because we had just gotten a puppy ourselves and were questioning every day in every way whether we had made the right decision. We had been so careful to find a puppy that was hypoallergenic and non-shedding, both to accommodate Isaac’s allergies and asthma and my low-maintenance household cleaning requirements. We researched and asked all of the right questions to make sure we were getting a kid-friendly, family dog.

We looked at rescues and we looked at breeds, and we finally found the puppy we wanted. He was a Whoodle, a Wheaten Terrier/Miniature-Poodle mix, a beautiful little puppy with soft wheaty curls and a little black beard. (Rescue folks, please don’t judge me, but…) We flew him in from Idaho to surprise the kids and become part of our family. Precious moments ensued, followed by chaos.

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If you don’t play…An Isolating Start to Motherhood

My passage into motherhood was not at all what I expected when I was expecting. Sometime in my son’s early years, I don’t remember exactly when, I had a fleeting thought that took hold: “If you don’t play, you can’t lose.”

The truth is, after Isaac was born, I was terrified I was going to fail at this entire phase of life. I didn’t know what to do with this little child I’d helped God bring into the world. He was tiny and precious, and I held him, and I loved him. But I truly didn’t know what to do with him. He was inexplicably small, didn’t eat as well as the doctors wanted, and slept a little too much. He wasn’t diagnosed with failure to thrive, but he wasn’t thriving either. The milestones were delayed, or worse, ambiguous. From his first breath, Isaac followed his own timeline, his own script.

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Reframing Beauty