When I return home yesterday from work, I walked into a house that emitted a sweet, pleasant odor...seems my bride had decided to give the pack members their Christmas baths in preparation for Santa's arrival in a few short weeks.

The coats (fur) on Lily, Lyric and Declan, our three Shetland Sheepdogs, were shining. Their shawls, the white hair on their shoulders, looked like those glorious clouds you see up in the sky on a sunny summer afternoon: glistening, sparkling and downright beautiful. Their paws, all 12 of them (that's for all three dogs; we have yet to get a dog with more than four paws), looked like they were all dressed in dainty little white socks, and they appeared to be strutting their stuff, heads held high, realizing they were so gorgeous now that they'd received their beauty treatments. (I bet our efforts at training them on their agility equipment is going to improve also now that they're so prim and proper! I can just see them flying over the agility jumps, through closed and open tunnels and rocketing through their agility tire jump in record time!)

My bride tells me the Shelties are easy to bathe; since they're so compact (weighing 22-26 lbs or so) they can simply be picked up and put into the tub; no discussion, no cajoling. If they don't like it, tough; they're portable enough so that we can impose our will on them with no trouble at all.

Then there's Dougie, our 70 lb tri-color Collie. His large girth makes bath time a bit more of a challenge. You can see a picture of our Dougie by clicking on this sentence. My bride says she can get him into the tub; it's getting him out of the tub that's developed into a slight problem.

When his bath is done, in order to get him out of the tub my bride has tried talking sweetly to him, ordering him, begging him and even lifting his front quarters out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor in the deparate hope that he'll lift his hind quarters out of his own accord. To date, all such efforts have failed & she's forced to lift his tremendous bulk out of the tub all by herself.

She's now contemplating waiting until one of our sons is home to help her in this arduous task. I hope this option works 'cause the alternative might be for her to ask me to bathe the giant.

And that's one job Santa wouldn't look forward to!