Since I've been home for winter break, I've realized two things:

1. Family is exhausting.

2. Dogs are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to this world.

I love my family. I love being home and getting to reintegrate into the whole living in my house thing. But, being away at school has made me appreciate having my space. Therefore, I have mixed feelings about living at home again. I can imagine that a lot of college students share this sentiment. It's great to visit, but once you leave home you rarely want to go back for very long.

However, there is a benefit to living at home, at that's our puppy. Her name is Roly-Poly (she was named by a four year old and we couldn't change it - it's the most fitting name she could have gotten, coincidentally), and she's a pitbull/lab mix. She's only a year and a half old, so she still acts a lot like a toddler. She'll run ten laps around the house without stopping, and then she'll nap for an hour. And every once in a while (all of the time) she just feels like she's not getting enough attention, so she takes something off of a shelf or wherever she feels necessary, and starts walking around with it until one of us notices and has to chase her. Then it's a new game.

I can tell puppy horror stories for days. Yesterday, she tried to steal a steak knife from the dishwasher and run away with it. This morning, she woke me up at 5 am because she decided it was time to eat breakfast. That's every morning, actually. We get up at an obscenely early hour, she eats and goes outside, and then we go back to sleep on the love seat that's really not big enough to sleep comfortably on. But it's her couch, and she likes to lay on top of me while I sleep and look out the window.

But, I learned something new about my dog a few weeks ago that confirmed my belief that dogs are the best thing to every happen to mankind.

I had a hard semester. It was a disaster, honestly. I struggled to maintain any kind of GPA, I had a lot of trouble with friends and relationships, I overworked myself, I didn't sleep much, and my family had some troubles too. Overall, it was just exhausting. When I came home after it was over, the three months of stress hit me like a train, and I broke down that night. I struggle with anxiety, and I had an anxiety attack. Roly was sleeping in my bed, and when I started to panic, she woke up and crawled up to my face to lick the tears off of my face until I felt better.

I've never had a dog do something like that before. I couldn't believe how much it helped to have her there, and how she helped me without needing to be trained or told what to do. They're incredible animals, and I understand now the benefit of having a stress animal for people with severe mental illnesses. I hope that I'm never without the love of a dog in my life.