ok, here are my preliminary findings.

with sentinel:
-sentinel runs [hooray]
-masternode starts [hooray] from wallet on Mac, running on VPS
-Status remains watchdog_expired and the Active time does not change [edit - time is now changing showing it is running, still waiting on watchdog message to change.]

without sentinel running:
--masternode starts [hooray] from wallet on Mac, running on VPS
-Status remains watchdog_expired and the Active time does change [ex: -4m: -3s]

do I need to wait longer with sentinel running for that message and time to change?