"You can move back into your house on Friday," my floor guy told me. "But, for the next three days, until the sealer is completely cured,
no shoes,
no furniture,
no rugs,
and no dogs."
Uh oh. This was going to be a major problem.
But in a flash, I remembered.
A few months ago, Gracie had gone through a phase of crazy paw-licking. With feverish intensity, she had developed the habit of working over her feet, one at a time, several times a day. In the process, she was creating sizable pools of - dare I say it - muddy drool, which was simply not working for me.
After stripping yet another set of slobbery sheets off my bed and cleaning up a puddle that had soaked all the way through to my mattress, I ranted my displeasure to my fourth-born. As she so often does, she quickly came up with a practical solution.
"Let's put some socks on her feet."
Now, this was not my first paw-licking rodeo. For similar reasons, I'd tried to put socks on each of my three previous setters and each dog had pulled those socks off faster than I could wrestle them on. This experience had taught me that no self-respecting pup would ever tolerate footwear. But I was not about to crush my daughter's ingenuity.
So I said, "Sure. Let's try it."
My daughter immediately set to work sorting through a variety of human footwear and soon came up with some that she thought might work. A few minutes later, Gracie was sporting two pairs of adult-sized striped socks.
To my surprise, she didn't seem to hate them.
However, the socks did not fit her properly, and they quickly slid off her slender feet.
My daughter further analyzed the problem and mused, "You know what might fit better? Infant socks."
Now I would have never thought of that in a million years. But my daughter works at Baby Gap and is therefore an infant sock professional.
And she was spot on.
The next day she brought home a two-pack of white infant triple-fold socks and they fit Gracie like a glove. All evening, our dog padded around in her new ensemble as if she'd worn socks her whole life. And all night long, she slept with her paws cozy and swaddled, apparently as happy as can be.
By the next morning, when we slipped them off for her trip out to the back yard and then slid them back on when she returned to the house, the precedent had been set. Gracie wore the socks nonstop for the next few days, and the incessant paw-licking ceased.
After a week, the socks were retired and Gracie returned to her bare-paw ways.
Case closed.
Back in the present moment, the solution to our no-dogs-on-the-fresh-hardwood-floors problem became blindingly clear.
Out came the set of white baby socks, in went her paws, and softly, smoothly, silently, across the fragile floors Gracie padded.
That was two weeks ago. Gracie continues to happily wear her socks, standing patiently as we put them on her multiple times a day, carrying on with the rest of her life as if she'd been wearing socks all along. Not once have we seen her disturb them or make any attempt to take them off.
In fact she seems to like them so much that we've bought Gracie two more sets of socks.
There are the pink ones that she wore for this photo shoot. When Gracie was a newborn, she was identified as the pink pup of the litter, so these seemed a fitting choice.
And then, because what dog doesn't need a set of bulldozer socks, there are these:
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