A photo journal comprised of my thoughts on motherhood and other life happenings, as well as some of professional work as a photographer. Southern California is home.
I swore, after the last time, that we’d never join Willy on one of his business trips out in the desert again. I mean I resorted to letting the boys play with the bidet, for goodness sakes.
But, lo and behold, we tagged along and, lo and behold, we had a good time. Jimmie behaved, which was a large part of the battle last time. We splashed around in the pool, made it out to Joshua Tree despite the on again off again rain, met up with some friends who were also out there for dinner and drinks, and visited the dinosaurs on the way home (Hooper’s been obsessed with dinosaurs as of late).
All in all, a great trip. We’ll be out in the desert again this weekend; this time I’ll be working. While I’m thinking of it, if anyone wants to book a Saturday session, that could work out. Email me if you’re interested, I love shooting in the desert: ashley @ thestorkandthebeanstalk.com.
My grandma rode the train into town to celebrate my dad’s birthday over the weekend, so we invited her along with us to one of our favorite spots to take Jimmie — The Dog Patch. Because of Jimmie’s horrible separation anxiety, we’ve had to adjust our lives to take him pretty much everywhere we go. We’re still training him to be able to be by himself and he’s made some good progress, but still has quite a ways to go. Anyway, we all enjoy the sand and sea and it’s always nice to return home with a tired dog and tired kids, albeit a bit dirty and sandy.
This post is in conjunction with the “What ____ looks like” blog circle. How it works is simple; we each link to another photographer’s post until the circle is complete. If you’d like, you can check out their work by following the circle starting with Summer Murdock.
I can’t say what it’s like or if it’s any different raising girls. What I can say is that it’s pure craziness over here. All the time. Jimmie has only added to the chaos, but in the most beautiful of ways. I obviously still miss Sarah, but I’m grateful to have a dog around again. And Jimmie feels like a good fit. Our only issue is with leaving him alone; he has horrible separation anxiety. Even when only one of us leaves, he starts pacing and panting and whining. The windowsill from the second story has scratches all over it from where Jimmie tries to look out the window for us. And when we do return, we’re always met with piss and shit to clean up. It makes leaving him really difficult.
We took him in the car a little while ago and someone called the cops, saying that there was a dog left in a car that “wanted out”. We went into the store for 10 minutes, tops. We went out to dinner and left him in the crate only to get a phone call from our neighbor saying it sounded like something was “wrong” with Jimmie based on “noises” he was making.
We’ve done our research and are feeling a bit defeated. Sounds like some dogs have it so bad that they’re willing to injure themselves to escape being alone. He looks like he is going to have a heart attack anytime we leave; every bone in his body shakes in fear. We spoke to one trainer who refused the case saying that changing a dog’s personality is “hard”. She wished us good luck.
