Slow and steady; that was my Crazy Town. Not perfect, but perfectly balanced and lovingly devoted to learning thru failure, or as I call it, finding opportunities to change and grow. Tips to be a better mom. A little improvement every day. Collectively, all my screw ups create the story of my crazy town.

For all of its external “chaos” I run this place
like an assembly line and seek out problems to solve by knowing I effed something up. That’s why all the fails are so important to identify correctly. I love solving problems.

I’m so good at building systems, in fact, that I have systems that run in tandem — so a tiny change in one system has the potential to create a dumpster fire in another if I’m not careful!

There was so much judgment in crazy town last year that I’ve had a TIME researching and evaluating all of it for absolute value, keeping up with my duties, the plans
I made, my goals, and upholding the promise I made to Rio… not to mention the unforeseen consequences of all the grass dying. We might have to refer to the 2023/24 era as the Crazy Town Dust Bowl, but I digress….

I welcome all opinions, ideas, and criticisms equally because in Crazy Town we can’t subscribe to any single norm and there’s lots of stuff I don’t know or haven’t figured out yet.

Every judgment, however, has to be evaluated for its overall and individual value and truth, and then it has to be “turned into” an improvement I can consistently deliver to my customers: the special needs dogs.

For each judge, I ask myself a series of questions: what does their assumption INFER; Can the judgment help me grow? How much does the judge understand about my story, the subject at hand and context they’re judging; what is their experience, and how qualified are they to influence and change our story? What can the judges’ assumptions contribute to my commitment to the dogs? What do they ‘see’ that I do not? Where is the lesson?

Clearly – it’s quite a lot of work and a big puzzle when I get a flood of them, but Crazy Town has been under a thorough evaluation to ensure we are up to snuff and enough for our bigger judge: Rio in the sky.

The cold, hard truth is that my brain came stock with a processing delay: it only thinks at one speed and I’m forever behind everyone else. I can’t queue floods of perspective data without working exponentially harder to process and sort it.

A bias can occasionally offer valuable insight, which is why I can’t count them all out. So far, however, the only real problem I can find here in Crazy Town is that I should have queued all those judgments straight into the trash. They slowed down our growth!

Here’s an example of a conversation I had with a trusted expert to do my duty to ensure my dogs aren’t actually underfed:

“I’m catching a lot of crap that Mona is too skinny, but she eats like a pig and I can’t get more weight on her. I’m worried that if I fatten her to appease the judges, MONA will suffer. The girl has a wonky backend as it is…”

The expert clarifies … “most peoples’ dogs are overweight, so Mona and other healthy dogs look skinny to them. If you listen to the judgements, you’ll be right: Mona won’t be able to walk.”

That’s why judgments so often stink out of context and they get in the way of the real work I’m trying to do. Crazy Town got knocked out of our imperfectly perfect orbit, and we’re getting back to the promises I made to our Rio who does not understand WHY the nursery has been vacant so long.

I’ve been working on some very exciting projects, and wait til I tell y’all about learning to tell new kinds of stories. One of them is a mystery about Lenny’s hidden agenda: He appears suspicious of all comfy surfaces, but in the end we find out he’s been investigating where farts come from to see if he can really trust the couch enough to let go and nap…

Lenny vs the couch vs the bed: will he ever figure out the culprit is not the pillow??