Cookie Monster comes for Thanksgiving

8:30 a.m. Thanksgiving Sunday morning.

Our 75 pound Old English Sheepdog puppy (yes, puppy) Sherlock starts to yip. Time to get up and let him out.

What's this in the middle of the living room floor?

A chewed up tub of green oil paint surrounded by paw prints? But Sherlock is in the sun porch (his bedroom that he shares with his Beardie sister Keltie). Or is he?

What's this in the kitchen....

The tubes of paint that were bought in Halifax last week. Oh no.... this is not going to be good (you can see the paws in the background)....

So, he's almost eight months old, very much a puppy, loves to chew, full of life, full of fun...

Full of paint.

It seems as if he's learned how to open the porch's sliding door, got into a bag full of oil paints, and selected green as his late night snack. He then stopped for a drink in the bathroom, and proceeded to check in on my son and his two buddies sleeping on couches in the basement (paw prints down the stairs and across the carpet). My son woke up - after Sherlock licked him and his buddies, and climbed on the leather couch - and led him back to the porch, where I found him at 8:35.

Hmmmmmm..... how to clean an oil-painted sheepdog......

After my wife and I cleaned the house and made breakfast for our son and his buddies, I tried hot water, soap, Varsol and the garden hose. No luck. So, it was off to the tub, with the same implements (minus the hose).

Lather, rinse, repeat, drain the tub, trim some hair, mix in some Varsol, repeat, lather rinse, repeat.... pause for sore back..... All we could do was laugh, that and scrub, scrub, scrub.  For almost two hours the bathroom resembled something hit by a green-and-hairy cyclone.

By 2:30, six hours after discovery, we had our own version of Cookie Monster:

I think I know how Jim Henson must have felt. I wonder how he came up with Big Bird?

Happy Thanksgiving!