Life with a Puppy

Wondering how the impulse buy we made a couple weeks ago is doing?

He's fit in quite nicely for the most part. I think Nenya does actually like him.

She's still top dog around here.

This is my first puppy, so it's been an interesting experience with a roller coaster of emotions.

It's easy to be happy with your dog when he's being adorable sleeping on the love seat.

But when he's tearing up the love seat?

Sigh...that's a little more difficult to deal with. But I still love him.

We've had him eight weeks, and I've been doing training with him daily for the past six weeks. He's doing great at sit, lay down, stay, roll over, and has even mastered shaking. He's smart but super stubborn, so it's been a lesson in patience. He seems to be learning what's his and leaving our stuff alone, but we won't be leaving him in the house unsupervised for a few hours again any time soon. Although Adyn doesn't seem to have had any obedience training with his previous owners, one bonus is that he's completely house broken. We haven't had any accidents yet!

It was a little crazy in the beginning, but having two dogs has been good for all of us. I do think two dogs is my limit though!

An $8 date

We've made it a priority in our marriage to have a date every week. This may sound expensive, but our dates are rarely the traditional dinner and a movie type dates. In fact, the one time we did eat out and see a movie the same day, it was lunch and a matinée. 

 For our most recent date, we took a long walk downtown.

 We walked along the canal...

 watched the local animals...

had fun taking photos...

 

 watched part of a free concert that happened to be going on...

and saw parts of the city we'd never seen before, like the central library.

(It's pretty epic.)

And we just had fun.

We bought some sorbet at the mall, which was our only expense other than the unavoidable parking costs. 

 

It was one of the best dates we've had in a while!

A New Trek

One of the 12 things I want to tackle in 2012 is figure out my blog purpose. As you may have guessed by my recent lack of posts, I've been thinking a lot about that one. Here's my state of the blog address. I'll keep it short.

Wedding Trek
I started Wedding Trek not long after getting engaged as a way to document my wedding preparations. To be honest, my main motivation for starting my blog was to have something to submit to become a wedding blogger for Weddingbee. It soon became evident that there was no way I could write 3 good posts a week, so I kind of gave up on that. But I had a few friends and relatives reading by that point, so I kept writing.

Newlywed Trek
When I got married I kept on writing, but I never have had a true purpose for Newlywed Trek. I wrote some about learning to live together, dealing with our differences, and figuring out my role as a wife. While we're still learning and always will be, that initial adjustment is pretty much behind us. Does that mean we're no longer newlyweds? Possibly. But either way, I think it's time for a new name and new direction for the blog.

The new name? Our Trek
The purpose? Writing about our lives

Sometimes I skip writing about things Nathan and I do because I worry they aren't "blog worthy." This blog should be what I want to write. Although it's been fun to experiment with ways to grow my blog, my focus shouldn't be on my stats. After all, I don't make any money from this blog. I know it's possible to earn a living from blogging, but since I would rather continue to earn a living as a designer, it makes more sense for me to spend my free time building my freelance business rather than building this blog.

In short, all that's really going to change around here is the name of the blog and the way I approach it. Thanks for reading.

The Impulse Buy

We made a bit of an impulse buy this weekend. His name is Adyn.

How did this happen? Well, I normally go shopping by myself, but this
time Nathan came with me on my Saturday shopping trip.

On our way to Meijer, we drove past Petsmart, where they had dogs out for adoption. I wouldn't have stopped had I been alone. But Nathan is a total dog lover, so we stopped.

And then something crazy happened. I was the one who fell in love with a dog.
We went on to do our grocery shopping, but I was almost crying as I
walked through Meijer thinking about him.

So along with our groceries, we brought home a new dog.

I think he was a pretty good deal though.

If you read my blog post about things I'd like to do before kids,
you might remember that getting a second dog was something we planned to do soon.

So, this really wasn't a complete impulse buy. We aren't completely crazy.

Just...mostly.

I think Nenya is adjusting well. I can't say that she loves her little brother yet, but she at least tolerates him about as well as I tolerated my little brother when he was born.

She's pretty independent these days, sometimes preferring to be left alone, so having a 9 month old attention hog come into the picture isn't too traumatizing.

Although trying to walk them together by myself the first time made me wonder if I was truly sane, this change will be good for me. Knowing I would have to crate Adyn while I was at work, I took him on a walk/jog Monday morning before 7:00 am. I'm lucky to be out of bed by 7:00 these days, let alone outside running by then.

Impulsive? Yes. But also really wonderful.

Grilled Cheese Rolls with Bread Heels

We don't eat a lot of meatless meals around here, thanks to my meat-loving, anti-vegetable husband, but one meatless meal we do enjoy often is grilled cheese with tomato soup. I normally use eight slices of bread for grilled cheese, making 2.5 sandwiches for Nathan and 1.5 for me. But when I wanted to make grilled cheese this week, I realized we only had four slices of bread left. However, we also had two heels. I had recently read about making grilled cheese rolls by removing the crusts and rolling a slice of cheese with a slice of bread, so I decided to give that a try with the two heels I had.

The verdict? They were delicious! They're really more grilled cheese "envelopes" than rolls since they wouldn't fold that well, but they tasted fantastic

What do you do with the heels in your loaf of bread? Do you eat them like the rest of the slices or use them for something else. I have a few in the freezer that I've been meaning to use to make bread crumbs. Sometimes I'll put them in with the brown sugar if it gets hard to soften it up again. And now I know I can use them for grilled cheese!