Puppy and work.

We are trying to focus on happy puppy energy – although we can get frustrated with her at times. She’s our third dog and, by far, she’s the most affectionate and loving and snuggly and that is so much fun and enjoyable- but she is also probably the most independent one, she doesn’t feel a strong urge to do what you want her to do. She’s tough to housebreak. We know the whole crate / uncrate / pee / predictable routine thing, but we’ve been taking her out every couple of hours and then a decent walk every 4 hours, but she’ll poop after 15 minutes after a 20 minute walk like it’s no big deal. Argh!

Jeremy is working through some tumultuous work stuff which is hard to see how it will resolve. He can get moody about this. I can no longer tell (and I think he can no longer tell) if he likes his job or not. I rely a lot on the evenness of Jeremy’s temperament to help even me out! So many days, he comes into my office, flops onto the daybed and says OMG, craziness at work.

Vince has finals today and Monday and then he’ll be a junior. I can’t really believe how quickly it’s going by. This is the semester that he learned to study. We argued (a lot?) in high school because I felt like he wasn’t studying and he said that he was studying. I mean, I knew he was sitting in front of the material for a couple of hours, but he wasn’t actually absorbing the material, but he thought that he was. His grades were uneven. I tried to have him study for the SATs, but again, that drilling of material, doing practice problems over and over again was not in his repertoire. I will say that I despaired (I can get competitive/comparative about these things which is my bad and not Vince’s bad – he’s fine) – I might not have been a good mother at times. And I worried. How can you do differential equations without being quick and accurate at algebra? But Vince pulled it together in – of all classes – quantum mechanics. And then he did it again in math. And then he admitted to me – so this studying thing, it works. I think he told me he studied 12 hours for the quantum test and 10 hours for the math test and I said – yeah, that sounds about right. And then he groaned and said, omg, I kind of wanted it not to work because it’s so much actual work to study and then I laughed.