My Quarantine Routine - A day in the life
Adelaide wakes up every morning between 7:30am and 8:00am. Since having Adelaide home again, we’ve been reacquainting ourselves with her sleep schedule. While she was in Branford with Jess’ parents, she stayed up later to be awake with her humans (getting a hyper playtime mood right around midnight). Now that she’s back in Toronto and we’re all home as a family together, we’re creating a new routine.
In a normal time, Jess tends to wake up anywhere between 6:45am and 9am. As an early bird fitness instructor, Jess noticed that Adelaide never wanted to wake up with her at 6:45am. She might pop her head up at this time, but then tuck herself back down into a little sleeping ball of ig. Now that times have changed a bit due to the current state of the world, we’re discovering how Adelaide functions when her humans have relatively no schedule. Here we will take you through an average “quarantine life” day according to Adelaide to discuss the changes we’ve seen and just to observe and document what a new day in the life looks like for now.
Let’s start at the beginning. It’s morning. The sun rises and spills a beautiful pool of light into our living room. Adelaide gets a little gurgle in her stomach... here comes the poop! The main reason Adelaide wakes up at all is because she has to poop. Luckily for us, Adelaide is very self sufficient when it comes to going to the bathroom. We are so fortunate that she has been 100% successful using her pee pads for both pee and poop since she was about 5 or 6 months old. The only downside is that once she finishes pooping, it’s like our sweet little iggy transforms into a rooster. We hear her rendition of “cockle doodle doo” which really just sounds like the saddest crying you’ve ever heard. She does not bark in these moments. Honestly, Adelaide hardly barks at all! She just wants us to come save her from the turd she’s left stinking up her bedroom.
Now this is where our routine begins to change. In the beginning, we held strong and after her first poop, we put Adelaide back in her pen. Sometimes she would tug a bit at her pee pad in protest or continue to cry. But eventually, she always would get back to sleep for at least an hour. Flash forward to 6-8 months in. Disclaimer: Adelaide is freaking adorable and knows how to work those puppy eyes. We started to trust that Adelaide would be able to hop onto our high bed and safely get herself down. This was our initial concern about letting the dog into bed - she was so tiny she couldn’t safely get up or down and we feared she might break her leg(s). At around 6 months, Adelaide was pretty successful hopping up and down the bed, even if it took a few tries. We decided that we wanted to try introducing her to our bed. While Adelaide is 100% pee pad trained, we didn’t trust that she could last the entire night without going to the bathroom and we didn’t know if she could signal to us that she had to go. With this considered we decided to only bring her to our bed if she had peed/pooped and was ready to go back to sleep. The perfect time to test this out was early in the morning right after her first poop and wake up. A routine developed out of this and we believe that Adelaide now expects it. Once we wake up and pick up her poop, she wants cuddle time. The only problem is that sometimes she isn’t ready to settle back down. Adelaide loves eating hair and chewing at pyjamas. While it is usually successful to bring her into bed, these times of craziness have made us revert back to the original plan - Adelaide sleeps in her pen and that’s it!
We’re a month into quarantine life and maybe one week into our new (but really old) plan. The first few mornings were really tough. It feels like we are back at the beginning with a baby pup. Adelaide cries a lot to be let out and sometimes even bites her pen and rattles it loudly. She knows that we are close and desperately wants to be with us. It’s tough but we are holding strong. After the first three days, it seems to be getting better. This morning Adelaide pooped and didn’t even cry about it. Our one concern about that is that she has a habit of eating or playing with her poop...so the warning call is sometimes pretty helpful. We are hopeful that we can keep training her to stay in her pen until morning, because ultimately we think she’ll be happier that way (and won’t make chew toys out of our hair).
After Adelaide wakes up, it’s time for breakfast. We serve her up a bowl of puppy recipe (Open Farm) and she usually starts eating it right away. Unfortunately, she doesn’t like her dried food as much as she likes her freeze-dried raw. We started mixing in the freeze-dried raw but then Adelaide began to not finish the rest of her meal. Whether we give her kibble or freeze-dried raw, she usually grazes over the course of the morning or even afternoon. We look forward to next month when Adelaide can start eating adult food because we’ve already prepared with 2 different types of food (grass-fed beef and homestead turkey ancient grains recipe).
After breakfast, we have a game of fetch or tug and after approximately 15 minutes, Adelaide is ready for her morning nap. She usually sleeps on the couch in a blanket or if she’s lucky, the sun will still be coming in the window and we’ll set her bed up in a sun spot. Due to our current circumstance, we don’t have to leave the house usually for more than an hour at a time. Without a defined schedule, we have been playing the afternoons by ear when it comes to Adelaide. It usually consists of two things: play sessions and naps. During the naps, we do our work or cook our meals. Quarantine has been pretty swell all things considered.
During the afternoon we either take Adelaide for a walk or spend time on our balcony for fresh air. We’ve been trying to reduce the amount of times we leave the apartment because of government recommendations (if possible, they suggest only leaving home for grocery shops once a week). We’ve noticed that spending time on the balcony satisfies Adelaide’s dog/people watching needs. She sits on the bench we have set up next to the glass so that she can see all the dogs and humans below. We’re hoping for warmer weather soon so that we can spend even more time outside on the balcony or a socially distance walk.
Our favorite time of day is after dinner when Adelaide usually mellows out and settles in for long cuddle sessions on the couch while we binge watch TV. They weren’t lying when they said these dogs are couch-potatoes. The hardest part is when Adelaide gets jealous of our technology. If you’re working on your computer or phone, Adelaide will either climb all over you, swat your technology away like she’s swatting a fly, or bring you an alternative toy to play fetch with. In these moments our best tactic is to give her a chew toy like a bully stick or cow’s ear. Usually this calms her back down and we’re able to get back to our computers or phones. In particular, Adelaide enjoys watching TV with us on the couch. If we’re lucky enough to have a show or movie with animals in it, she might even get a little vocal. She starts to look at the door, thinking the animal is waiting for her just on the other side of the door.
When it’s time for the humans to go to bed, Adelaide has usually already been sleeping for a couple of hours. We lift her up off the couch, usually have a family hug and admire her sleepy cuteness. After we wish her goodnight, we put her back in her pen. She’s usually so sleepy that she’s fully asleep again before we’ve even finished locking up the pen. If we’re lucky, she sleeps through the night. We love our little Adelaide and look forward to spending more quality time with her during these uncertain times. History is happening right now in the world, and we are just grateful that we have the ability to brighten our little girl’s life hopefully as much as she brightens ours.
Til next time...
Ryan and Jess