#Atti has a good ‘out’ thankfully or it would all be even worse

[dogwisdoms]

Right dogblr peeps I need some help.

I’ve been seeing a lovely guy, R, for a couple of weeks and the last two dates he’s been at mine... Atticus has no problems meeting new people out and about beyond a bit of typical puppy excitedness, and when we stay with my parents all his attention goes to Gatsby and he ignores my mum and dad. Unfortunately I haven’t had/made opportunities to have people come over to my flat while he’s been growing up and it shows (my only local friends are colleagues really and I don’t see them out of work). When R comes over Atti is LOSING HIS DAMN MIND and won’t leave him alone or settle down at all. When he gets excited his mouthing turns harder and leaves marks, and also he’s managed to rip holes in 3 items of R’s clothing. It’s embarrassing!

What we’ve tried so far is heavily rewarding calm behaviour and being on his bed when R first arrives, we put a barrier across the room to begin with. This did work to some extent but isn’t sustainable for the whole evening. Last time we moved into the garden and played tug, throwing the rope between us to move his focus to/from R a bit - this also helped. The first time, we had some success with turning the lights off while we had a film on and Atti eventually conked out at about 11.30. Last time he was on the go until R left at about 2am and then he fell asleep within a minute of him leaving!

Excitement at the start of the night is fine and expected and manageable… the main frustration is when Atti is clearly ridiculously tired but still GOGOGO and constantly climbing onto R on the sofa and chomping at his hands/arms/hair/clothes. I’ve put him in the other room, I’ve blocked him off in the kitchen (kinda worked as long as we didn’t move a muscle 😂), he’s had chews and lickimats and distractions. If separated he claws at the door and cries - he doesn’t really do this when it’s just me at home.

I will absolutely be getting his crate out for next time and returning to ‘putting him to bed’ when he’s behaving like an obnoxiously tired toddler - it used to work when he was younger and couldn’t regulate himself. We’re also going out for a walk with him later today - hopefully the more distracting environment will help a bit.

I know a lot it is going to be time and repeated meetings until Atti doesn’t find R so exciting but if anyone has any suggestions for how to make this a bit easier for all involved I’d be super grateful!

[canaryatlaw]

Well today was fairly good I suppose. My emotions were somewhat blah sometimes but other times they were ok, so that's something at least. But yeah, alarm went off at 7 and I convinced myself to get out of bed by 7:01 (okay, it just turned 7:02 when I stood up) and did the whole normal morning thing, got to my office and started on the work my boss gave me yesterday for today because she was gonna be out in the field for most of the day. It was two unfounded packets and then two permanency hearings for next week. The first unfounded packet was kind of questionable, it was against the natural mom who apparently let a cousin who has sexually abused the oldest daughter come to some visits, but they unfounded because he was supposedly never alone with the kids (which is shitty rationale IMO) and because the outcry wasn't completely trustworthy because the girl has developmental delays and couldn't come up with a set timeline. But at least hopefully that issue is dealt with. The second one was sadder, but not because of the actual situation, where two little girls were saying that their otherwise perfect record foster parents who they'd been with for two years out of nowhere started beating them, and everyone involved pretty much agreed their mother had put them up to that because she's disrupted the placements of her (apparently numerous) other kids in the system multiple times before just like that. And of course they got moved because of it and it just made me sad. So very selfish. But with those done I moved onto the permanency hearings, two older kids, one of which has been on run but is now considered to be off run but in an "unauthorized placement" because she's living with her boyfriend, but she's like, 17, so she really shouldn't be. We need to do a visit with her at some point before court so I tried calling the like 3 numbers listed on her sheet and got no answers, left a message at one at least. That was a dependency case coming in. The second came in as an abuse case but kind of became a dependency one, the younger kids were returned home but because of the older son's mental problems he wasn't and was given a goal of independence. Apparently he has a fairly low IQ (somewhere in the 70's I think) and very defiant behavior to just about everyone, but it looks like he managed to just graduate from high school, so that's good at least. So I prepped their forms depending on their cases and then sometime around then it became lunch time. It was one of the ladies on the calendars birthday, so we had ordered out from her favorite Greek place (she's like, hardcore Greek) and all ate in the lead attorney's office. My actual boss still wasn't there, but it was kind of nice to just sit and talk to the other attys, we have a women on our calendar which is kind of cool, and they were ragging on one of the ASA's who apparently has a bit of a sexist side, so that was good to now. But yeah, mostly we just laughed and had a good time and I enjoyed it. The gyro I got was pretty good, and only minimally hurt my stomach (unfortunately expected) but I just felt super full for the rest of the day, even though I didn't finish it. Back to work after lunch, just dealing with some other files and reading through the last reports on the TPR prep. There was apparently a rather in depth one I hadn't seen yet that was critical in changing the goal for the second kid, it was quite the insight into the parenting skills of the second father who looked half decent on paper but apparently had quite a ways to go in reality (he was asked like, if his kid was returned home to him (not that he ever lived with him to begin with) how he would deal with him being sick and he said something about his temperature would be office if it was like "in the 90s or 100s" because he thought normal was "in the 80s" so, yeah). So that was a good final piece to that puzzle. I looked through a big file twice trying to find an appointment order to attach to a criminal investigation unit request, but it was not in there, so I ended up having to request the paralegal fetch it for me tomorrow (I mean, I know how to do so myself, but the lawyer I was doing it for said to have the paralegal do it, and he's really cool, so it works). I might've worked on some other little things at some point but I think that was most of it. I played a little candy crush at the end of the day before heading out like 10 minutes early to hopefully catch the 5:03 bus to get home a little earlier, because I had a limited amount of time to get something done before I had PT at 7. So I knew my Amazon rental textbooks were due sometime at the end of this month, and it's been like in my mind this entire time, I'd been saving boxes for them, but never actually got around to just boxing them up, printing a label and bringing them to the UPS store. I know it's getting late in the month though so last night I checked online when the deadline was, and oh look, it's today, and the UPS store closes at 7. Well. I guess traffic was good because I actually managed to get off the bus by 6:08, which is impressive, and thankfully gave me more much needed time. I ended up having to use two boxes, one of which was a USPS flat rate box that somebody sent me something in but I was like you know what I'm just gonna slap the UPS label on it and hope nobody notices 😂 so I leave with the two boxes in my cart at like 6:45 (they weighed like 15 pounds between them, so I knew carrying them wouldn't end well cuz I've been down that path before), then walked to the UPS store in town and dropped them off quickly, then walked the rest of the way down the street to PT (I'm forever grateful to live so close to so many crucial places). I was back with my original guy today for the first time after his Europe trip, and he took a bit of a different approach today because some of my muscles were still super tight, so he asked if I would be willing to try this thing called dry needling, which is like sort of acupuncture but not but basically sets off a twitch response in the muscle and supposedly sets it back to its baseline if it was being under or over active (or at least that's how it was explained to me). I wasn't a huge fan of the idea, but my back has still been killing me after weeks of PT, like over a month now, so I said what the hell I've dealt with worse and went with it. It wasn't too bad actually, I couldn't really feel them going in but then when they hit the muscle there's like this dull achy cramp feeling that's not pleasant at all, but it doesn't last very long and you can like physically feel the muscle release. I think he only had to do it like 3 times and it really released, so that was good. We tried some slightly adjusted exercises after that and by the time I got out of there it was almost 8:30. I already had my cart with me and we ran out of toilet paper last night (again) so I ran over to jewel across the street, and also grabbed eggs and milk because I was out of those, a few yogurts, two frozen meals with meat in them, a bottle of Advil since I almost ran out, and of course a giant thing of toilet paper. I could like, barely shove it all into my cart but it just fit. I was pretty tired at this point but I wanted some damn ice cream so I walked back down the street and waited in line at the ice cream place. I was gonna get the peach Melba frozen yogurt again that I've been getting lately that's really good and makes me feel slightly less guilty, but then I saw that they had black cherry (it's one of their rotating flavors and I hadn't seen it in a while) which is like, one of my all time favorites, so at the last minute I switched and went with that). By the time I got home after that it was like, 9:10, but I made some eggs (now that I had more) and sat down to watch the second episode of the keepers, being that I said I'd keep with it, and holy shit, you can definitely say I'm hooked now. Like the episode was absolutely horrifying to watch because it mostly consisted of these women describing the heinous sexual abuse they were subjected to as children at the hands of the priests at their school, then ends with this giant bombshell that strongly indicates they had something to do with the murder of the nun who two of the girls had confided in, which was the tagline that originally got me interested in the series. Well, I'm all in now, for sure. And yeah, sometime after that I called it a night and got ready for bed. During the day I was of course obsessively checking my grades since tomorrow is the grade deadline, and at some point discovered I got an A- in crim pro II. I was slightly disappointed with this, but I also know I shouldn't be because that class was literally all ASA's and PD's and then there was just me, the person from juvenile court who just likes criminal law, so of course the curve was gonna be harder, and I still beat out a hell of a lot of people who intend on doing that for a living. So I know I shouldn't be disappointed with it, but I still can't help being a little bit. I'm just really hoping I pulled off that A in LARC now, but I really don't know. Still waiting on that damn grade. I would be surprised if I got less than an A-, but I'll probably be pretty mad if I do get an A- just because I worked so damn hard in that class and it was such a pain in my ass. Plus, going from last semester getting 3 A's and 1 A- to 3 A-'s and 1 A doesn't sit well with me as far as keeping my class rank, which was the goal here the whole time (I mean, top 10% just has such a nice ring to it.....sigh). But I guess we'll see. That grade just better get damn posted tomorrow, she's had our appellate briefs for over a month now and there's only like 13 of us in the class, you really have no excuse for blowing the grade deadline (especially with all the shit they supposedly hammer into us about the importance of meeting deadlines). So yeah, hopefully we'll find out on that tomorrow. Okay, that's all I got. Guess we'll see what tomorrow brings. Tonight was also officially 1 week since I started my new med, which means it was time to up it to 2 a day instead of 1, per my doctor's instructions, so hopefully that won't wreak too much havoc on my brain (I really hope so, anyway). Okay, really done now. Goodnight baes. Stay beautiful.