I am of two minds. Awake and in a dream state. I haven’t had four hours of straight sleep for two weeks. I’m tired, eating badly and not exercising. I need to shave my legs. I keep forgetting to floss. Well I don’t actually forget, I’m just too tired to bother.  

Truth is, I’m a bit of a mess and my back aches from bending and chasing and scooping and barricading… I feel like my house is under siege — invaded by two furry little dictators. Zeca and Marceline are their names and they are forty days old (Labrador Retriever). And for the record, they only chews, gnaws and takes. They do not retrieve.  

And the crazy part of this dream is that it’s not a dream, it’s not going to end anytime soon, I can’t go back and, we — foolish naive people that we are — we invited them in. We beckoned, wished, searched, found and flung open our arms to this — our pets.  

People tell us, “oh you’ll love it”, “oh it will be the best thing you’ll ever do”, “oh they’ll become a part of your family”. Sounded great. We heard the warnings too, “oh a puppy’s a lot of work”, “oh prepare not to sleep ever again”, “oh you know it’s like having a baby”. But we shunned those warnings. We knew better. We knew we were ready and we knew, in our heart of hearts, it wouldn’t be that bad. After all, we are home, we have a small family, we love walking and running, and we have more than enough space and time in our lives for these little beings. 😉 

The time is never right to turn a perfectly peaceful life upside-down. But we did and this is where I am now. Missing what I had and squinting through the fog of this dream state to try to see more clearly what this strange new land I now inhabit looks like and feels like.  

We’ve all been here if we’ve lived at all. Something new comes into our lives. We start school, we get our first job, we meet someone special, get married, have kids. We continually make choices and then, when the dream state of fatigue and overwhelm begins to clear, we adapt and we learn to put one fluffy slipper in front of the other and bag yet another lovely morsel of poop left on the sidewalk. We do what we have to do…and we do love it….♥ ♥ ♥