Jasper Redecorates

So the Captain and I were bad parents this week. Last Sunday we made plans to play paintball with a military friend of ours who was transferring off the island. My limited experience with paintball told me that the adventure would have us out of the house for 2-3 hours and that it would be perfectly acceptable for us to leave Jasper alone for that time. Well, it took us a little longer than expected. When we stood in front of our door 7 hours later ripe with bruises, dread overtook us. "Oh please Lord. Let us still have a living room."

When we opened the door... oh I wish we had taken a picture. It was pure chaos. There stood Jasper surrounded by all sorts of rubbish, looking up at us as if to say, "Hello parents!! Look what I did to the living room! Don't you just love it?!" The rascal had taken it upon himself to pee four times on the carpet, gnaw through our Rosetta Stone headset and the power chord to Michael's computer and toss paper all over the living room. It turns out that the paper we found came from Michael's Bible, which lay in a state of disarray surrounded by family history and preface pages. The cover had been torn from the binding and a chunk had been taken out of the spine but upon close examination we discovered that no text had been damaged so Michael dusted it off and took it to school where it would be safe.

Looking at the mess we were astonished but not angry. I mean, what can you really do at that point? It was our fault that we had left him alone for 7 hours and while he knows he's not supposed to pee on the carpet there was no point in scolding him because he would have no idea what it was for. So we picked up the pieces and resolved to put EVERYTHING up the next time we left the house. Absolutely everything.