max

pup snippets

/ abby hummel / 2 Comments

As expected, getting a new puppy right after moving has been a great way to start settling in to our new community. I take him on walks several times a day, which is great for improving his behavior and my mental health. While we’re out, we chat with the retired guys shoveling sidewalks, we meet the girls waiting for the middle-school bus who think he is “sooooooo precious!” and we explore new parts of the neighborhood. As it gets warmer and our walks get longer, this will start getting even better.

We’ve also ventured to the dog park on the edge of town, and have therefore been introduced to some of the drama of being “pet people.” There are the people who tell me it’s okay for Max to jump on them when I have just chastised him, because “he’s just a puppy.” I have seen an untrained Labrador knock over a child, which is unacceptable for a domestic animal, so please excuse me while I teach my dog to behave better than yours. Others make snide comments about how “you know what you’re getting because all Labs look the same,” and tell me they fell in love with their rescue dog just before he was going to be put down, which makes me feel like I should reassure them we worked with an ethical breeder and that strong breeding lines benefit dog owners everywhere. I usually smile and tell them their dog is wonderful even if I think it looks like, well, a real dog.

And crate training is apparently very controversial, too. Some dog owners think it’s awful and abusive to “lock your puppy up in a jail cage.” In contrast, I feel great about establishing myself as the head of the pack by teaching Max it’s a privilege to be in the house with me, and that he likes playing by himself in there anyway.  I don’t even want to know what people would say about shock collars on the little guy if it is needed when we start retriever training this spring.

Sometimes it’s a bit of a dog-owner-eat-dog-owner world out there.

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Maybe it’s because I’ve home by myself all day for a month, but I feel like I really have a sense for what Max would be saying to me if he could speak.
“No biting! That hurts me!”
-“Yep, sorry. I know that.”
“You can chew a stick or sit by my feet.”
-“I’m just licking my stick and your sock now. Licking, licking, lick/nibbling, licking, it’s more of a tooth massage than a bite anyway, licking, you don’t have to notice this bite, licking, licking with mouth on you, BITING, OK I’M JUST BITING AND I’M NOT ASHAMED.”

God must think I am such a puppy sometimes, too.

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Though Max is still naughty, and what he has gained in maturity just barely compensates for the fact that his increased size means he’s more powerful in disobedience, there are still so many wonderful moments where we all get to enjoy life in our new home. My friend Bethany reminded me that living harmoniously with animals is nature as it was truly intended. We are reclaiming a bit of Eden and proclaiming a bit of heaven, and we’ve been soaking up all these wonderful moments.

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Whoever coined that phrase about “Biting the hand that feeds you,” was most definitely thinking about raising a puppy.

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reading round-up (1.17.14)

/ abby hummel / 3 Comments

As I’ve alluded to before, it’s pretty cold. People who voluntarily move to Minnesota at Christmas are not really allowed to complain about this, so I am trying to find ways to celebrate the season. Of first importance, we celebrate that Max is pretty confidently adapting to using his doggie door, which makes the most annoying part of puppy-raising require less time out in the cold for us. Secondly, I’m really enjoying Six Classical Music Portraits of Winter from The Imaginative Conservative. Let me know if you have a favorite!

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I really appreciated 5 Tips for Loving People through the Loss of a Marriage. It makes my stomach turn when I think of how much pain I’ve watched friends experience in divorce, and when the people who should be able to love them best don’t know what to do, it seems even worse. I especially loved her points about the importance of avoiding assumptions (you do not know all the details, ever), validating a person’s experience without jumping to advice, and being a safe presence for the long grief journey.

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Looking around at this new house splattered with stuff I can’t figure out how to organize, and a non-working dishwasher, I’m grateful (and most needful) of the encouragement about keeping a clean home from Emily. I definitely recommend all four parts of her series, and hope to get to a point where they can be implemented here soon!
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I can’t decide which of these pictures I like best. The duck? The St. Bernard? The bunnies? Maybe the bunnies. Agh. So cute.
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Aaron’s birthday is next week, and I’m very excited to be substituting these wonderful Chocolate Peanut Butter cups in place of his usual request (“Buckeye Peanut Butter Balls”), because they taste the same and are so much easier to make! Also, significantly less messy. The only question is: big or small muffin cups? I could see this going both ways.
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USA Today shares their reader’s photos of extreme weather, which recently featured “my” lighthouse in Michigan. I find some comfort knowing it’s really cold there, too.

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[photo by Ted Swoboda]

reading round-up (1.10.14)

/ abby hummel

As more of our friends are having children, and therefore statistically we have more friends with children who are special needs, I really liked this article about kids with disabilities. I feel like a klutz sometimes when this comes up — I can’t even figure out how to comment on this without fearing that I’m saying something wrong. I’ve enjoyed reading about how some of my friends from high school are discovering a beautiful life with their new little boy who has Apert Syndrome, and if you get technical about the meaning of names, I love that their blog title “Don’t Doubt Jack,” really means “Don’t Doubt that God is Gracious.” In a world that very often “terminates” unborn babies for the slightest disappointing ultrasound report, I’m glad to see parents celebrating the victory of their kids’ lives. It’s good.

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On a less serious note, I loved almost everything about Coffeedoxy and Heterodoxy, except their derogatory comments about eggnog lattes. Those things are almost the coffee version of the incarnation, the perfect culmination of eggnog AND espresso, and I would drink them year-round.

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With a new puppy, we also have a rediscovered passion for Dog-Shaming.

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Since I’ve, uh, had a few things going on, I forgot to link this earlier:  I guest posted for my friend Emily while she was busy having her two babies. (And learning to write shorter posts is my 2014 blogging resolution…!)

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Boston Review’s The Truth about GMO’s was a great read. The author does a great job of explaining how the technology of modern genetic engineering is actually altering less of the genetic code than cruder methods used during the past few thousand years of crop development.

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Little Max

/ abby hummel / 4 Comments

Little Max has been the most delightful (and naughty) addition to our life! We are sleeping less, getting drastically less done around the house, and housebreaking this close to the arctic circle is a bit more challenging than it may be in better weather, but the payoff of a great dog for the next decade+ is something we’ve been excited about for a long time. We’re already marveling at how big he is and learning some of his little quirks.

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Name: Max, after the poor little dog in The Grinch and a sidekick to the villain in The Great Race. (It tells a lot about Aaron’s sense of humor that he wants his dog to feel like the sidekick to two different cinematic villains.)

True cinematic alter-ego: Chewbacca from Star Wars, because he is brown, furry, makes funny noises at all times, and has more than earned the nickname “Chewie.”

New tricks: running up and down the stairs; occasionally sitting on command; whining when we do not provide a treat for spontaneous sitting.

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Likes: chewing fingers, socks, carpet, knit items, ANYTHING FLEECE, furniture, ANYTHING FORBIDDEN, pens, toggles on winter coats, paper; licking; treats; scratches; naps on laps; exploring outside for very limited periods of time; waiting for the chef to spill food while preparing meals; attempting to pit the grown-ups against each other; snooping on computer usage.

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Dislikes: chewing on toys while there are more exciting things elsewhere in the house; being unable to fit on laps and under certain pieces of furniture when it worked last week; watching Deadliest Catch (he probably thinks Duck Dynasty would be more appropriate, being a bird dog himself); getting cold paws when we go outside.

20140109-091210.jpgAnd… his snout is already longer than it was in this picture!

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(Yes, I suggested the name Dwight a few times before we got him.)

rough newness

/ abby hummel / 6 Comments

After what honestly feels like the most unsettled month of all time, we find ourselves in a new year, a new town, a new house, and we’re starting to get some of the puzzle pieces of this new life put together just enough to start re-dreaming.

We didn’t plan to move to Minnesota until what really feels like the last minute. We committed to this job less than three months ago! Aaron has a commute that will take up hours of his life (and our family time) during this season, which is just unavoidable if you are the sort of person who needs a yard and works in a big city. I don’t have any piano students yet, which means the budget is t-i-g-h-t for the foreseeable future. We don’t have friends yet, or a church – although we did visit one close to the new house and plenty of people said hello so we certainly plan to visit again. I can’t remember how to get to the grocery stores without looking it up on my phone and I can’t find one that carries my favorite brand of boxed pizza crust mix. I say all this not to complain, but to acknowledge that transitions are always rough, and this week I am feeling that roughness a lot.

We sat down on New Years Eve and talked about the year past, which we have wondered about and anticipated for our whole marriage, and I couldn’t stop talking about how I am scared to be so out of control in every bit of things. We have lost a life that was working and have to figure out the new one, which may or may not have much in common with the old one. It sounds so negative to speak of things in these terms, so I have to reframe these conversations and rename these fears. I want to think of this as entering a new life with so much beauty and goodness and wonder to uncover and receive. I want to be grateful that it isn’t going like I planned, because what I strive for is never the very best. I certainly didn’t expect all the goodness we experienced in Iowa, but it was there waiting anyway.

Because if I think of this in the way I want to, I would just write about how much I miss the park by my old house, and the high ceilings, the dishwasher that worked, the people I knew, the kids I saw every week. I would tell you how much I miss the Fareway meat counter and our church and knowing just where to go when I needed to get out for a bit. I would lament about how disappointing it is to be a longer drive away from our extended families, which means significantly fewer visits in the next few years. Instead of staying in that longing, I want to figure out how to accept the unsettled mess of today a little longer. Because even when I thought I had it made, I was never really in control and I was always flying by the seat of my pants anyway. (Nostalgia is such a liar.)

There are no serious New Years Resolutions this year. Just a few practical must-do’s, such as getting a piano studio off the ground and possibly getting a part-time job while that starts up, and then upgrading a few things done on the house. (Like I said, I really miss a working dishwasher. There are also several things offending my aesthetic sensibilities.) But I want this year to be full of receiving grace I could not have orchestrated or dreamed of myself, and I want to have a good attitude about it in the meantime. I’m going to fail at this, probably a lot, but when I’m not keeping it together, I want to fall forward. I want to fall into the newness of whatever moment God has given.

One of the beautiful, new, delightful gifts (already!) has been the arrival of this little pup, who has been hoped for many, many times in the past five years. The timing of getting a seven-week-old puppy while your moving boxes are not unpacked is probably not advisable, but we decided to take advantage of a litter with the exact parentage we wanted. It’s probably better to do this before we start to ever think about new furniture, really.

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So we are trudging through the joy (cuddles and cuteness!) and duty (chewing and housebreaking!) of having little Max, and someday when we stop sleeping in winter coats so we don’t freeze to death when we take him out in the middle of the night, I will probably have many wonderful updates about how the rest of life is coming together, too.

All his work is done in faithfulness. …The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. – Psalm 33:3&4