This Is My Beautiful Mess

I think somewhere along the way, dog training became something we associate with having a problem. Your dog is aggressive, destroying the house, dragging you down the sidewalk, or suddenly doing something that has you wondering what happened to the sweet little puppy you brought home six months ago, and then you start thinking about training. But there’s this whole other category of things that a lot of us just kind of learn to live with because they aren’t necessarily seriou

I thought childhood was something you left behind. You grow up, move out, build a life of your own, and eventually it becomes a collection of stories you tell once in a while when something reminds you of them. At least, that's what I expected. I never imagined that one of the biggest parts of becoming a parent would be revisiting my own childhood over and over again, often when I least expected it. It doesn't happen during the big milestones. It's not birthdays or school con

When we first got Kona, she had already lived with two different owners. Her first was a college student who kept her kenneled for most of her first year of life. Her second was a foster home with two dogs, two cats, and more than a dozen children—where, once again, Kona spent much of her time in a kennel. By the time she came to us, she had spent roughly the first eighteen months of her life confined. Because of that, she had no real understanding of how to simply exist in