COVID-19: Part One

On Part 1 of this episode of "Canine Connections," Teena Patel discusses the effects that COVID-19 has had on both the University of Doglando and her family.

There’s a level of balance that is being forced on us right now. For some people, it’s easier to recognize it as such. But I think the coronavirus has made us more aware of what we need to balance out. And it’s so beautiful that one experience that is common to all has so many individual experiences tied to it. Here we are collectively experiencing one thing, and yet, there are so many versions of how it’s landing on each one of us individually and its experience for each one of us.

For our situation, I can look back and say wow. How beautiful everything is aligned to prepare our family for something like this. Naylan, my son, is not in school, so we don’t have a morning routine where we wake him up against his biological clock and have to deal with the morning challenges of waking a child up. That has never been our lives. That’s not how we have spent any of our days over the last five years with him. So this has been interesting now because all of a sudden, all of the kids that were coming to our house before coronavirus are now adopting our lifestyle. The lifestyle that we had that they were always so envious of. They really wanted it, and, now, here it is, and they won’t receive this gift. They find it challenging to receive. For us, nothing in our routine has really changed other than when Naylan would leave the house for his daily activity. We had to reevaluate what it looked like to do something. And, if we can step out of the idea that doing something can only look like the form of leaving your house and going somewhere, if you look at the scope of the experience that was tied to having to leave, what is it that Naylan was achieving? It’s actually really easy to create experiences here within the context of our home and allow him to explore creative avenues in giving him that stimulation that he was getting prior. It’s so fun. It’s allowed him the liberty to experience what activity he is into to the fullest.

Teena Patel is the founder of the canine enrichment campus, University of Doglando, for restricted canine companions. The University of Doglando is a place where dogs can be dogs and live a fruitful and purposeful lifestyle. To learn more about Teena Patel and the University of Doglando, please contact us online or call us at (407) 574-3160.