Good Boy

This is a pic of our pup, Autumn. She's not actually a puppy, she's a grown almost 12 year old. She's a lab, probably 90 pounds. One time she wrapped the leash around my legs and jumped up and then I fell in the street. She's a big girl. 

And she IS a girl.

Today on our walk we walked by someone who very confidently said, "Good boy!!!"

This happens all the time. 

I think it's because she's a dog and all dogs are boys, especially big dogs. They're definitely boys. That all makes sense scientifically. 

Why do you think our brains do that?

 

Teaching kids important stuff like sunsets

I accidentally have been training my kids to love and appreciate sunsets (and sunrises if we ever make that happen). Everytime I see a good sunset, I yell to the kids, "Look at this sunset! Look at how beautiful it is! Look at all the colors" and then we look and everyone says, "wow, that's a nice sunset" or something like that and then we list all the colors we see. For a while we'd watch the sunset every day when driving home from daycare and after a while I noticed that sometimes before I'd even look up at the sky Clara would yell, "look! look at that sunset!" When it started getting darker later and the sun would still be pretty high in the sky on the way home, she'd say with much concern, "mom, but where is the sunset?'

That's probably one of the best things I've accidentally taught them. Hope you find some beauty somewhere and accidentally help other people do the same. 

Here are a few decent ones recently:

2025 feelin' alive

Hi! Welcome to my blog this year! 

This is the time of year when new friends that I’ve made since last year learn that I’m a little funny or kinda weird, or like a 20/80 split between the two, with this annual thing I do. (ALSO, this is my TENTH YEAR doing this?)

I do this blog during Lent (Christian liturgical season we’re in rn, that comes before Easter) to add a practice that isn’t scrolling on my phone and one that helps me be vulnerable in a good way and hopefully brings a little smidgeon of joy. It’s called 10% serious, because that’s how serious I want to be about this. I want this to be like seeing a puppy when you’re sad (or happy, I actually hope you're happy tho).

Here are some possible topics this year that I thought of just now (my rule for continuing this blog every year is that I’ll stop when I stop thinking of random stuff and that never happens): 

• Apples, peanuts, and crafts at Grandma’s house
• I forgot to read, but here’s a list of tv shows I watched
• Spotify playlist when you have children
• Things that make a day good
• Musical chairs, and other games that didn’t age well
• Quote Notebook, as in a notebook with quotes not quoting The Notebook
• People are worth knowing
• Insomnia hacks
• Cute things Clara says that I’ll be sad when she says correctly
• Quick, you’re leading this thing in 3 minutes
• Lesser known/ somewhat made up adhd traits
• Cheese.
• Bucket list
• Lutheran amen
• Mean things you don't have to do
• Perfect job
• New projects I might want to start
• answer with a song