Is it ever OK to paint the dogs?

Is it ever OK to paint the dogs?

We had a small incident last Thursday that I can laugh about now (sort of), but it’s not like its resolved or anything. You see all of our dogs are still painted red. I have to take my fair share of the blame because I was supposed to be in charge – keeping track of the children and doing what fathers do. I failed pretty badly (and it’s definitely not the first time).

The day started off bad. I went to bed at roughly 3:15 a.m. the night before (I’ve been working lots of overtime to pay for medical bills and Christmas) and I slept through the loud 7 a.m. alarm. My theory is the music from the alarm became incorporated into the dream I was having. Anyway I woke up at about 7:30 a.m. and I had to get Leah and Alex ready and up to the bus stop (by our mailbox) by 7:48a.m. This would be impossible – add to this the fact that I felt laterally like I was walking in mud (I was exhausted). Motivated by my one-track-mind which only wanted more sleep I decided to call the school to tell them that Leah & Alex weren’t feeling well and they wouldn’t be coming to school today. Then I went back to bed – big mistake – huge mistake. I thought I would be OK because the kids are still asleep at this time.

Leah is our oldest child. We try to give her some responsibilities befitting her statue as the oldest which is sometimes to watch over her younger brothers and sister for short periods of time. Cheryl and/or I are within shouting distance if something should go wrong (as they sometimes do). So far more often than not Leah becomes part of the problem and not part of the solution. On this morning everyone was up but Jenna and I. Leah was doing who knows what and the boys (Alex & Ben) decided that now would be a good time to crack open a couple of cans of spray paint (one red and the other light blue) and proceed to paint our three dogs who were helpless in their kennels. They probably tried to paint our cat too but he is free to escape and does so. Cubby got it worse – a full sustained blast to the face with red paint. Pretty much the front 1/3 of his body (including all of his head) is now red. Cubby is now red and black – he looks like some kind of weird mythological creature – a half red, half black little fox like looking thing. Teal’C (our Golden Retriever) just got some red paint along one side of his body. Our black’n’brown hound dog Libby also got some red paint to the face and a bit on his body as well. All three of their kennels are painted, and they also decided to paint our push mower, power washer, parts of our riding mower, parts of the garage floor, the garage space heater, and even Midnight (the cat’s) kennel (which thankfully was unoccupied). Oh yeah – must not forget about the door going into the house (kitchen) and part of the kitchen floor – also painted red. Now this is bad enough but Ben decided to also spray some OFF mosquito repellant on various places in the kitchen. I suspect that Ben was the OFF sprayer and Alex was the paint sprayer because Alex decided to spray Ben a little as well. So when I finally get up and come toward the kitchen I smelled a strong smell of what I at first thought was fingernail polish. Turns out it was mosquito repellant sprayed on the counters and floors in the kitchen, and then I proceeded to the garage…

Well I became pretty mad and the boys spent a real long time in time-out listening to me yell a lot, but I do have to take my fair share of the blame.

I should point out that this isn’t the first time Alex and Ben have went crazy with spray-paint. They decided that the rims of our Durango SUV and Dodge minivan needed to be painted blue one day last summer. It took me several hours of hard polishing with rubbing compound to fix that mess.

Maybe we should hide all of the paint and put it up on a very high shelf.

Brett