Socially Distancing for the Social Butterfly
Hello friends!
Now, more than ever, we hope that you are holding your fur babies tight and finding joy in the little eyes of your iggies. Whether you are an essential worker, quarantined or staying home and practicing social distancing... it is an emotional time for all. To all of our essential and health care workers - we thank you for helping heal us, nourish us, and give us confidence that there will be light at the end of the tunnel. If you find yourself struggling during this time, we’re writing to you today to bring a little joy and share our experience with Adelaide over the last few weeks and few months. We’ll start here with a 2020 update and then share our experience with social distancing and acclimating Adelaide into a new lifestyle. Here we go!
It’s been a little while since our last blog post. To be honest, 2020 has been a wild adventure thus far. In January and February we were traveling a lot (anticipating a big move to come in the near future) so Adelaide took a couple of months to stay with Jess’ parents just outside of the city. While we missed her greatly, we were comforted by the fact that Jess’ family love Adelaide so much and have lots of time and space to devote to her. For a couple of months, Adelaide had a little change of lifestyle so we’d love to talk about what we learned from the experience.
While living outside of the city, Adelaide was more adventurous with her walks, walking for 45 minutes a day without slowing down. The funniest part was the effect the pavement had on her nails. A bad habit we’re working on fixing is Adelaide’s tendency to jump on her hind legs when she sees something in the distance she wants (ex: a new dog or human friend). While she jumps like a crazy kangaroo, she wears down on her nails. This has been convenient for nail clipping because her pawdicure can be reduced to just the two front feet. Turns out that pavement can be a great nail buffer!
Something Adelaide loves about her grandpawrents’ house is the ability to look out the window. At their house, they have long tall couches she can crawl across and survey the area. Now that Adelaide is back in Toronto (in our apartment) we find that she misses the people/dog watching activity. With most of our time being spent indoors these days, we decided to push our bench up to the glass portion of our balcony so she can get a real view of the street. It’s amazing to see how much joy she gets from seeing people or dogs passing by. The funniest thing she does is try to climb under our divider to the neighbor’s balcony so that she can get an even better view of people that pass by. Our efforts to make the balcony a more welcoming space (we deep cleaned it and made it doggy proof) seems to make it a bit easier to satisfy her desire to see other dogs, but we still go for limited walks. We are lucky to have Adelaide 100% pee-pad trained, which helps the limiting of walks as well. We try our best to stay inside and going on the balcony makes this even easier.
What we’ve learned in 2020:
1. BLANKETS ARE GOD
One thing we’ve learned is how much she loves blankets. We noticed that when settling down for a nap on the couch, Adelaide starts to scratch. At first we didn’t realize what this behaviour meant. Did she not like our new leather couch? Turned out that Adelaide was scratching to try and pull the blanket we had draped over the back of the couch, so she could wrap it around herself. Adelaide has always loved being in blankets, but we’ve never seen her wrap herself so tightly inside the blanket by herself. To get inside, she digs inside a blanket pile with her paws and then drapes it over her snoot. Once she’s got the blanket over her snoot, she circles around until completely engulfed by the blanket. We’ve decided to give Adelaide more blankets and she never fails to curl up into an adorable ball of blanket.
2. TV BABY
Another thing we’ve discovered is her love for television. Adelaide in particular loves seeing real live animals. When we watched the new Disney nature documentary, Elephant, Adelaide got so worked up about the animals that she would stop mid-play session just to watch the screen. Adelaide loves seeing real animals but isn’t too picky. Sometimes we’ll be cooking and away from the TV but she will sit on the couch and watch the screen all on her own. She enjoys anything from Rupaul’s Drag Race to The Office.
3. I HATE THE MACHINES
We’ve discovered her strong feelings of jealousy when it comes to technology. If you’re using a computer, Adelaide will jump up and sit beside you. Sometimes she’ll try to crawl on your lap and really put a damper on your work session. Her hatred/jealousy also covers cellphones. If you’re sitting near her and holding a cellphone she might try to bite the phone. Adelaide has also actually swiped screens away with her paw or nose. She’s going to be an Instagram influencer before you know it! We’re looking to have some training sessions soon to try and calm down her hatred of the machines...
4. HAIR OR CHEW TOY?
We always knew Adelaide loved chewing hair, but because of quarantine/social distancing, Adelaide has been getting MANY more opportunities to chew hair, hair ties and scrunchies. Mom’s job is to teach fitness, so while her studio is closed she is teaching online and working out in the living room everyday. The second Jess hits the floor, Adelaide pounces on her hair like it’s her favourite toy. Something we’ve learned is to keep Adelaide in her pen during workout sessions.
While we may have known some of these things to a certain degree, all of the time we’re spending with Adelaide helps solidify these patterns in our minds. We look forward to more quality time with our little girl and learning even more about her.
Now, let’s chat about social distancing!
We are so happy to have Adelaide home again with us and fortunate for our timing. We brought her home right at the start of our country/world’s effort to socially distance ourselves and stay home. If we had waited any longer, it wouldn’t have been wise to travel. We are both artists and currently no longer able to work because our jobs require meeting in person and in groups (group fitness instruction or performing for theatre audiences of 500 people). Having Adelaide home again has brought us so much joy and we are fortunate to have the time to spend with her. With all of this extra time, it feels like we’re learning all about our dog again. She is no longer a young puppy... soon she’ll be eating adult dog food!
One thing we’ve always known about Adelaide is her love for socializing. What do you do in a time of social distancing?
The hardest part about staying inside with Adelaide is her desire to meet other dogs. While we’ve heard that dogs cannot contract the virus, we don’t feel comfortable with Adelaide socializing with other dogs or humans right now. Playing with others just encourages us as humans to come in contact with the owners. Adelaide loves to spin around other dogs and then the leashes get tangled. If we can avoid other dogs, it helps prevent us from coming in contact with other humans.
As we mentioned earlier about the balcony, it works well to give Adelaide a place to people/dog watch... but we do go for limited walks. When we go outside, Adelaide has such a hard time avoiding other dogs because she wants to play. Adelaide has always loved playtime and socializing more than anything (even more than treats!), so we’re trying our best to keep her far from temptation. On walks, we keep a short leash if passing in the street and try our best to walk in less populated areas (a difficult task for someone in downtown Toronto!)
With a lot of time spent indoors, it’s a challenge to keep Adelaide entertained. While we play fetch, play tug and have training sessions, something we’d like to add to the routine are puzzle games. We had a wooden puzzle games previously that was the hardest difficulty level, but she figured it out in just 15 minutes. A puzzle game that she still loves to play is her milk and cookies toy. The toy is a plush carton of milk with holes in it and squeaky cookies for her to search for on the inside. Adelaide’s head is so small that she can dive in, grab the cookie in her mouth, and then shake the whole carton off her head. Now this is an entertaining game for both dog and human! While she has a great time with this toy, we will remain on the lookout for something new to occupy her time. We would love to try a DIY puzzle game involving toys or food that could be challenging enough for her.
One of the scariest moments we had was learning that pet stores are no longer on the list of essential business stores in Ontario. With Adelaide’s first birthday coming up, we’re looking to change her to an adult food diet. In a usual time, we would go to the store and try different foods (we love that our food company, Open Farm, makes so many different flavours for adult dogs). When we heard that pet stores were no longer essential we worried about being able to get her food online (so many online deliveries are being delayed until May). Luckily, our local pet store, Timmie Doggie Outfitters has curb-side pick up and even delivery service on a popular food delivery app (Foodora). We are thankful to be living in an age of technology and we’re grateful for small businesses like Timmie’s for providing the community with safe opportunities to keep their dogs happy and healthy.
We love our little girl so much and are so grateful to have her with us during this challenging time in history. We know that with all of this time together we are going to continue to learn more about Adelaide and how to better serve her needs. We hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy and we wish you all the iggy love in the world. Until next time, friends!