2020: January-March.

Albeit true, it is cliché to say that the world has changed since I initially had this post sitting in my drafts, when January & February passed us by, but March seemed to last forever.

Freya is now 7 months old. These pictures of our life are mostly of her, as that is what life is about now. I don’t remember what I was thinking about at the start of the year, but whatever it was, it isn’t important now, for what is actually important is all that remains in our lives.

Adopting Freya in December, January was still about getting to know her, teaching her how to understand our life, and restructuring our life around her being in it. We started waking up a lot earlier (and stopped needing an alarm clock, because she became ours), making our way to the dog park at 7:45am so that she could have 45 minutes of play with other dogs before we each had to go to work at 8:30am. This year, we got fairly lucky with the winter weather, with only a couple of spells of -30ºC—during those days, we had to learn how to be creative with games for Freya indoors. We started taking Freya tracking twice a week, where she learns to hone her natural instinct to use her nose—finding a person or an object hidden in the woods using her sense of smell alone. There, she gets to be part of a new pack—as do we—and she gets to do something engaging, fun and freeing, running around the woods, playing with other dogs, having a job to do.

We have learned so much about Freya in these last few months, and how right our initial instincts were when we saw her up for adoption all those months ago. We were amazed at how quickly she learned things; how calm, playful and sweet she was. To date, our furniture still looks as it did before she joined our family—not a tooth or claw mark to be found. Looking back at these images, I can see how Freya has grown, and now that the ground is thawing and spring is here, we are excited for another season of firsts with her.

Below: a documentation of our lives from January-March, 2020. I wrote about life after the coronavirus pandemic in this post: Stay Home.