As you know, we have 2 golden retrievers, Reese and Cooper. Most of the time they are very well behaved and don't get into trouble. Yesterday, they got into trouble. A lot of trouble...

When we lived at the apartment, we kept them mostly in their crate while we were gone during the day. We had an extra room at the back of our apartment where we could leave the crate up and it wasn't in the way, most people didn't even realize it was there. In the house, we don't have a room like that anymore. Our options for dog crate placement were a bedroom upstairs, the basement, or someplace in our dining/living room. We decided that we would just try and see how they did without the crate. They are 4.5 years old, we've left them home alone out of the crate before and they usually are fine. We tried that for a few days and it wasn't working very well.... they were getting onto furniture, and more importantly, trying to look out the front window by putting their paws up on the window, leaving scratch marks on the woodwork. So then we decided to just gate them into the kitchen. We had done this for probably almost a year at the apartment (gated into the kitchen), and this worked fine until they started chewing on things in the kitchen (always this one doorway). That's when we started putting them in their crate almost every time we left the apartment. Anyway, it's been almost 6 months now that they've been gated into the kitchen at the house when we're gone, and for the most part, they have been fine. They started chewing on this little rug that is by the back door, I was annoyed, but I forgave them. But last night, Mike came home and for some reason, they really wanted outside. Outside before he saw what they had gotten into during the day...

They ate my digital camera case.

The camera was inside the case, and while the case is destroyed, so far, the camera seems to still be working. It's kind of scratched up, but hopefully that will be the worst of it. Everything else in the case is also destroyed. My extra memory cards, the adaptor I need to transfer pictures off of the camera, everything gone. One of the memory cards had all of my pictures from Finland on it, but I think (I hope I hope!) I transferred those onto our external hard drive awhile ago, I need to check on that tonight. I will be so upset if I lost my Finland pictures.

So, it might be a little while before I can post any pictures, I need to see if I can buy a new card adaptor. The strange part is that there is so much food that they could get into in the kitchen, and the camera was sitting on the counter right next to a box of chocolates. Why did they eat the camera instead of the food??

Reese and Cooper know they are in trouble. They know they did a very bad thing. And all last night, while I sat there angry at them, they just looked at me with their very best "I'm the most pathetic dog in the world and I'm so so sorry, please just pet me or I might die" look. And I, of course, gave in... I'm still mad, but really, who can resist that look??

But now I'm not sure what to do with them during the day. Should we give them another chance at just being gated in the kitchen, maybe making sure they have extra chew toys? Should we try to set up the cage somewhere? Any other suggestions??