Paws and Reflect

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Paws and Reflect

🚐 Full-time travel with a sensitive heeler
💭 Emotions, fulfillment, training, nuance

01/08/2025

Something VERY COOL happened yesterday!!

Two weeks after we were introduced over email, I got to meet E.B. Bartels—author of “Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter”—in person! 🥹 Colleen Kinder (of and ) thought we might be kindred spirits, and wow wow was she right. E.B. is as lovely as I could have dreamed after reading some of her work. She *gets* life with a sensitive dog. And her book comes out in paperback this fall! (If you’ve got the means, preordering the paperback would be a wonderful way to support her.)

If you’ve been here for a while, you probably know that I LOVE thoughtful nonfiction about animals and continue to dream about publishing my own. This has been the year (particularly the summer) of better putting myself out there in the name of connection and community, and it feels surreal to proudly display a signed copy of a book—that I can say was written by a friend!!—on the van’s tiny bookshelf. Surreal in the best way.

“You know, the world is just full of wonderful people,” I told Sean when I got back yesterday, and I meant it, and it was such a lovely thing to be able to mean with my whole heart (especially given the horrors and hurt also in this world). If you’re able to, Scout and I encourage you to go play with your dog today to find some little lovely wonder of your own 💛

12/06/2025

Here’s to more of these sorts of interactions, I hope, and less of the overwhelming divisive anger I have been all too familiar with—have allowed myself be all too familiar with—over the years. 💛

Go play with your dog, if you’re able!

20/05/2025

TL;DR: I love having so many memories to look back on. I love you for reading this (and anything else I’ve ever shared). I love you for being part of the good on social media. I love you for loving your dogs. Go play, if you’re able!! 💛

Lots of you know that early last year I took my first social media break since adopting Scout in 2019. After five years of posting on Instagram almost every single day, I dedicated a few months to drafting a book manuscript. Publishing a memoir-esque account of life with Scout—my thoughts and feelings on dog stuff finally organized in one coherent place—is my dream of all dreams.

That first draft document reached about 60k words... but it was a mess. Between the sense of chaos I felt every time I opened it and some shifts in my other work life (oh, the unpredictability of freelance budgets) I lost motivation. I kept setting goals to look at the manuscript, revise it, do SOMETHING, but the imposter syndrome weighed too much. I fiddled with social media and Substack and anything else I could use to distract myself from the fact that I was not moving closer to what I said I wanted most.

Well, when we got our short-term lease for the summer, I decided I needed to lean into the extra energy I’d have from not worrying about where to park our house or fill up with water or a million other van-life things. I set a word count goal. I created a brand-new draft document. I bought a paper calendar to hang above my desk where I could tangibly track my progress.

And it is going better than I hoped 🥹

Make no mistake, it’s still disorganized. I have so much work to do! But I am excited about that work. I am knee deep in memories of Scout, scrolling through old Instagram posts, rereading blogs, remembering feelings I hadn’t realized I’d forgotten, amazed all over again at everything life with this dog has been and still is.

Hopefully someday a literary agent sees something in our jumble, too. Until then, I’m already proud. And always hers.

And yours, too. I wouldn’t have dared think I could write a book about dogs if it weren’t for your voices over the years.

05/02/2024

Finishing my Paws and Reflect book draft is officially at the top of my priority list (which means it needs to be ahead of Instagram). I’ve been circling around this for a while (too long) — thanks to some recent reading & conversations with Sean, it’s time to make a few more changes!

It’s not that I don’t still value this platform, or that I don’t LOVE connecting with you and your dogs. I do!! But I have never wanted to focus on something so much as I want to focus on writing this book. It’s been my dream… but I’m afraid I haven’t been giving it proper dream treatment.

I think scaling back on social media will help me save my capacity for deeper, long-form writing — and “store up” thoughts to fully contemplate (rather than halfway talking about a topic in a story share, meeting my initial impulse to address it, and then forgetting to spend greater time reflecting).

Sooo all this to say I’ll be spottier interacting here. (I’ve been cutting down my social media use since moving into the van, so maybe it won’t be that drastic of a change, but felt worth giving a heads up so as to not be a total ghost!). I do still have some drafted posts I want to share and am sure other tidbits will come up as time goes on, so I’ll definitely still be online from time to time. Just trying to be increasingly intentional about how much of my day is spent looking at my phone when there is so much else to do.

Thank you thank you thank you for talking dogs and life with me. And for loving Scout.

Now go play with your dog if you’re able!!

03/02/2024

What Scout perceives… versus what I perceive

Sometimes I have it in my head that something should go a certain way, but the dog in front of me feels differently.

Like, I assume a certain situation shouldn’t be a big deal compared to all the other things we’ve accomplished together. Or vice versa, I assume it *should* be a big deal. But then when I actually pay attention to Scout’s behavior & body language I might realize she’s experiencing it totally differently — feeling something I didn’t expect.

Just because I understand that a new dog won’t try to get in her face doesn’t mean she knows it. Just because I realize the loud sound we’re hearing is the neighbor’s new harmless thingamajig doesn’t mean she does. Just because I conceptualize a novel park as very similar to other ones we’ve visited doesn’t mean it feels the same to her. Etc etc etc.

Living with a dog is a constant exercise in empathy, I think, if we let it be. And that’s been a really lovely thing 💛

31/01/2024

Taking Scout on adventures is one of my favorite things. I’m so thankful we get to enjoy this great big world together — but we don’t bring our heeler *every* place we go.

It’s important to respect the space we’re in, consider our current mental + physical capacities, and ask what the result of a given outing would be. (Tons of fun? a bit of discomfort that would make life better in the long run? or just not worth it?)

I don’t bring out this flowchart for every single decision since it’s often an intuitive process. But thinking about these questions has been really helpful when I’m struggling to decide if Scout should tag along or not!

A brief overview of my thoughts on “everywhere dogs” over time:

• My goal used to be to have an everywhere dog because it felt like that’s how I could “prove” I was a good enough owner and that Scout was a good dog. Now my biggest focus is on creating the life that is most fulfilling for us both as a team, whatever that looks like.

• There are plenty of mildly uncomfortable situations where Scout’s joy at spending time with her humans outweighs any negativity. There are also environments, though, where she would truly prefer to just stay in the van.

• We absolutely push her limits sometimes in the name of growth (and because every relationship has some give and take!) but on the whole I want to spend our time together in ways we both love.

• Some environments are just a straight no-go for us. Others depend on our mood and if we want a challenge. There’s nothing wrong with making different decisions in different moments.

• Just because we “can” doesn’t mean we “should”.

Does your dog enjoy being out and about with you in public? How do you decide whether to bring them along?

30/01/2024

When Sean was looking for new jobs in our second year of dating (before we ever lived together) and evaluating places he could move, I said I’d be happy to go just about anywhere with him — except that I didn’t really see myself “living in like, Florida”.

Joke was on me, huh? 😂

We spent three years in the sunshine state from spring 2020 to early 2023 when we hit the road in Hermes the van.

While we’ll always be Wisconsinites at heart, I think — our bright childhood days and long college nights imprinted deeply — I’m surprised at how right it feels to be back in Florida for a while.

There are obvious issues, of course, especially politically. And if you don’t like swamps. (I never felt more like Shrek than in the years we spent on the space coast.)

But traveling around so much in the past 12 months has made me more confident than ever that I LOVE the beach. Possibly more than any other landscape, and I say that as someone who hiked mountains in Alaska and marveled over red rock formations out west. Plus my surgery-recovering dry eyes are thrilled about the humidity. And it’s easy to feel cooped up in the van when it’s cold outside — we were way less active in December and the first part of January — so waking up to 50+ degrees and the ability to comfortably lift weights outside is delightful 😍

Scout, for her part, seems to easily remember how to be a Florida dog. There are lizards to chase and shorebirds to stalk and sunbeams to sleep in and familiar patios to visit.

Here’s to nostalgia. And having as many homes as feels right.

28/01/2024

The other day I found myself making a “Scout training timeline” — basically just a big list of roughly when, and loosely in what order, I taught her different things.

I’m sure I’m not remembering everything perfectly. But it satisfied my itch to reminisce and that was the goal!

I initially got interested in dog training, way back before Scout with my family’s husky, because of ego. Genuine curiosity, too — I loved dogs, I wanted to do cool things with them! — but quite a bit of desire to feel “good enough” and get some validation from a community I looked up to.

Then I got deeper into dog training with Scout out of necessity. We were not living a mutually enjoyable life together at first (as much as I wanted to feel like we were). She was really struggling with her fear reactivity… and *I* was really struggling with my human end of things.

So once we reached a point where our shared day-in and day-out was pretty good? Well, it makes perfect sense to me that the list of “new commands / cues / skills we learned each year” dwindled and dwindled to where 2023 was a great big “nothing we hadn’t done before”.

It’s not that we don’t still enjoy training together. (I stand by the belief that every interaction with our dogs is training, technically, or rather that living together is synonymous with learning together.) And it’s not that we’ve stopped growing completely. (That would be a sad day!)

But I think maybe I was a bit fatigued of some of the nitty-gritty technical training stuff after it occupying so much space, physical and mental, for so long? And I also realized that my biggest interests are a bit broader. I love watching trick videos and cheering for our friends in dog sports, for example — but for me personally those things aren’t compelling goals. I want to read about social species overall and nerd out over theory and most importantly just move seamlessly through my days with this delightful dog.

Here’s to looking back, and looking forward, and embracing that every dog/owner/lifestyle can look different, and loving what we’ve done together — what we still do together — even as things change over time 💛

27/01/2024

Happy anniversary to Hermes the yellow home on wheels! 🎉

Yesterday marked one year of full-time van life. And we are not tired of it at all!

You can plan ahead and do your best to prepare… but sometimes the real test is just “doing the thing” and seeing how it feels. I am over the moon that we guessed correctly when we figured living on the road would be a good fit for all three of us.

Here’s to never “settling down” 😉

(And a huge thanks to for taking this photo of us last fall. It’s perfect.)

17/01/2024

“And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

I am actually not a believer that everyone should have a dog BUT still found this passage touching. And love that Sean captured me and my girl doing what we might do best.

💛

15/01/2024

I was a tracking fiend last year 📊👩🏼‍💻

Over the summer I converted my haphazard list of spots we’ve parked the van into a detailed spreadsheet (which can easily be uploaded to Google My Maps so I can zoom out to see where we’ve been).

The data visualization bug hit me hard after that — a few weeks later I got excited to turn my 2023 reading log into a more detailed table, then I figured I might as well update Scout’s medical history document, and I added a comprehensive “van maintenance” tab to our overnight stay spreadsheet too.

Tracking things has been a mixed bag for me in the past. I have a tendency to get obsessive in ways that aren’t always healthy. But it’s also SO satisfying — and motivating! — to see everything laid out.

I’ve learned that I just need to be thoughtful about what I decide to track in the first place and self-aware enough to notice early if I’m getting too fixated on a specific metric.

I especially love being able to easily calculate percents and averages from spreadsheets. It’s interesting to see how often we sleep on remote public land vs in chain store parking lots, for example, or how often I give books five stars.

Are you a tracker? What are your favorite ways to log things?

10/01/2024

Sometimes you just have to build a snowman sitting on top of a snowman ☃️

One of my favorite things about Sean (that has been heavily encouraged by Scout’s presence in our lives) is feeling like silliness is always on the table. After he finished a work meeting yesterday I announced that we should go play in the snow and then make hot chocolate… so we did just that.

I think we’re all ready for some warmer weather (and to be on the road just the three of us again, back to our normal) but it’s been wonderful to see loved ones AND get some childhood-nostalgia-fueled winter time!

(Spot Scout’s in the background… something to tug with is never far out of reach if she has anything to say about it 😂)

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Welcome to Paws and Reflect

Sharing in hopes to encourage other dog lovers. 🐺 Scout (3?) Stray adopted Jan 2019 👩🏼‍💻 Haley (23) Writer and dog nerd

Who are we?

We’re Haley and Scout, a 23-year-old writer turned obsessive dog nerd and a 3-year-old stray heeler turned girl’s best friend.

I adopted Scout in January 2019. Since then, we’ve navigated dog reactivity, apartment life, a big move from Wisconsin to Florida, and countless ups and downs in between.

We’re passionate about:

Being responsible, respectful species ambassadors

Supporting reputable rescues and breeders

Embracing emotions and growth

Understanding that each dog is an individual

Asking why we set certain goals

And more

Above all, we care about living a good life together.

A life we both enjoy deeply, freely, and with as much harmony as possible.

I write about our experiences in the hope that our blunders and realizations can encourage other human-dog duos. We’re no experts, but we love sharing our journey to connect with other owners.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have questions — and check out our suggested reading for a good place to start!