i still believe

When I was so clever and productive yesterday, doing all that grocery shopping, somehow I forgot that I would want to eat things for breakfast. So when I woke up this morning the first thing I thought about was the fact that I have no milk for the coffee and nothing breakfast-y to eat. For some reason all winter when I'm getting up at the crack of dawn the very idea of breakfast makes me nauseated, but in the summer when I wake up later breakfast is one of my favourite things.

I decided to go and buy a couple of muffins (as well as some milk) and took Little Puppy with me in the car. I tried out the new seatbelt harness on her which is a contraption I bought to keep Puppy E from climbing up my face when we're on the road. It's a vest that the dog wears and it has a loop in the back that you string the seatbelt through, effectively forcing puppy to sit or lie down in the seat instead of having free roaming capabilities. Because Little Puppy is so little, I've never allowed her to roam freely through the vehicle when I'm driving anyway. A little tap on the breaks would send her flying. So she normally rides inside her crate.

Em and D, however, have been given this free roaming privilege at times and it hasn't been very successful for Em. D is very polite for some strange reason and sits nicely on the passenger seat and doesn't move much. Em, however, is a nightmare. He runs from the front seat to the back seat over and over and over again, from window to window, from side to side, climbing up my arms and face when he feels like some attention, and generally making it hard to keep the car on the road.

When I took Em to the dog food store the other day he made such a nuisance of himself that I bought the harness for the ride home, and found it was quite wonderful. Not only did it stop him from buzzing all over the place inside the car, it also seemed to help him to settle down emotionally. He is a very nervous dog and perhaps having limited options makes him feel safer. I resolved to go back to the store and get two more harnesses for D and Little Puppy. D doesn't require one in terms of managing his behaviour, but it would be safer for all of them in case of an accident.

So as a trial run this morning, I put Em's harness on Little Puppy and went to the store to buy a muffin. She wasn't pleased, particularly, but she was no less pleased, really, than she is when I put her in the crate inside the car. She simply doesn't enjoy being in the car because, I suspect, she probably associates it with going to the vet. For that very reason I have been trying to take her other places in the car where no one pokes a needle in her when she arrives or removes some of her teeth. She cried a bit, which is typical, and then forgave me as she nibbled bran muffin crumbs on the way home.

Long story. No point.

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I'm starting to feel a little bit panicked about the fact that men are coming to pack up my house on Thursday and that Shawn won't be here to oversee it and make sure I don't make some sort of fatal error that results in something essential being packed away where we can't get at it, or forgetting to pack something beloved and enormous that won't fit in the car and will therefore have to be abandoned on the side of the road.

If there's anything negative about having opened up with Shawn to do the degree with which I have, it's that I sometimes feel that I have lost some of my confidence where it comes to dealing with things on my own. It's not often, anymore, that I have to manage independently, but when I do, I don't like it.

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