So this just happened…

My mom walked into the bathroom and said “Pepper!! Hey! Come look what your dog did!” I couldn’t figure out WHAT she had done… Pepper has started rifling through trash cans for kleenex, but I had specifically emptied the bathroom trash can so she couldn’t do that.

I walked down the hall and looked in the bathroom – and somebody had grabbed the roll of toilet paper, dragged it into the middle of the room, and had proceeded to start shredding it.

“Oh. Pepper?? No way. I bet you Payton did this.”
“Payton? But Pepper was IN HERE. And Payton doesn’t do that, does he?”
“Oh yes he does… in the basement, the toilet paper isn’t between the toilet and wall like it is in here, so he keeps trying to grab it. I bet it was Payton.” We look down at Payton. “He looks guilty to me,” I add.
“Check for evidence,” she says.

So I grab Pepper and open her mouth, look all over her gums… nothing.
Payton has not had the sense to flee yet so I open his mouth – and I don’t even have to look very hard, there’s little pieces of toilet paper ALL OVER his tongue and his teeth!
“IT WAS PAYTON!” I show my mom the toilet paper on his tongue.
“What! He was trying to frame her!”
About this time I look at Pepper and I actually see she has a piece of toilet paper stuck to her mane. “Ah!! Toilet paper!”
“So she DID do it!”
“No, I bet she just got into it after he shredded it… Payton probably taught her to do this. Payton! Did you teach Pepper how to do this?!”

We’re both looking at Payton, who looks up at me, and…
he starts WALKING BACKWARDS out of the room.

My mom starts laughing and I start laughing and I’m CRYING I’m laughing so hard because he just keeps walking backwards, looking super guilty. He gets all the way to the hall where he can’t back up anymore, stands there, and s-l-o-w-l-y lays down and puts his ears down in his “I AM SOOOO ABUSED” sad face.

Now, I DID teach Payton how to back up. But I never actually put a cue on it. And the cue was MOST CERTAINLY not “Did you teach Pepper how to do this?!”

Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
I told him “I think you might ACTUALLY be the naughtiest dog in this house.”