Yesterday was interesting.

BJ and I spent the entire day cleaning the dogs.

When I say the “entire” day, I really mean it.  It started out with baths — assembly line style works best when you’re trying to scrub up four of them — and since they seem genetically encoded to hate bath time, there was a lot of crawling under beds and looking in other favorite hiding spaces.  Meantime, trying to keep already-wet dogs off the sheets during the search missions for the others is next to impossible.

Everybody now has minty fresh breath, too. That’s never fun.  Have you ever tried to manipulate a toothbrush firmly held in the back teeth?

Poor Ginger still looked scrappy, even after her bath, so she got another haircut.  Yep, she’s bald again.  We didn’t have the heart to subject her to two baths in a single day, though, so she was dropping little clumps of loose hair everywhere.  Sigh.  And Bird was having a fit.  There’s apparently something very disconcerting about trembling wet dogs to a parrot.

Far and away the most time-consuming part was grinding down the toenails.  Each dog has 18 toenails, counting the dew claws, and they were all way too long.  We got one of those Peticure things off TV, and it really does work well, but after 72 little jerky toes, both of us were about done.

We’ll give them a week, and then we’ll grind off some more.  But in the meantime,  I think I’ll go break into my tea collection and make myself a nice hot cup of Earl Grey.  That, and rub some Aspercreme on my  sore neck and shoulders.