Case of the Missing Ear Plugs

Hubby sleeps with earplugs at night and he hads (make that had) two pair of custom molded ear plugs.  They are more comfortable than anything you can buy over the counter.  He has been keeping one pair of ear plugs on the nightstand for the past three years and there has never been a problem.  Until recently.

One evening he notices that his ear plugs are gone.  We look everywhere imaginable and come up empty.  So, we start going over when we saw them last, etc.  We realized that they were laying in the middle of some of the Bob's soft mints (he keeps those on the nightstand too in case his blood sugar goes low) the night before.  One of our dogs, Riley the lab mix,  LOVE those silly mints. They are like doggie crack to her.  But we couldn't figure out how she could have gotten the ear plugs out without moving the mints or the cloth that was on the nightstand.  Why would she take the plugs and not just take the mints?  So we came to the conclusion that either she smelled the mints and took the ear plugs by mistake, that hubby accidentally threw them away (not likely, but you never know), or Abbie, the rat terrier, got up on the nightstand and took them.  Again, not sure how she would have done so without moving the mints or the cloth.  After exhausting all options, we decided that if either of them ate the ear plugs, we would know soon enough.  So, hubby pulled out his spare pair of ear plugs.

The next morning, hubby realized when he woke up that one of his ear plugs was missing.  Not both, just one of them.  He put them in that night and remembered taking one of them out and putting it on the nightstand during the night, but it was now gone.  Again, we did the search and came up empty.  We pulled the bed out, looked in pillow cases, looked in the bedding, looked under everything, in every corner; we literally took the bedroom apart and looked everywhere.  This time, the dogs were in their kennel, so where could this blasted ear plug have gone.  Now, we decided there was only one thing left to do...search the dog poop.  Yuck.

Later that day, we did our initial poop search and sure enough, we found the first pair of missing ear plugs.  The were eaten by Abbie, the rat terrier.  Somehow she managed to get them off of the nightstand without touching the mints or messing up the cloth that was on the nightstand.  No clue how she managed that, because I can't touch anything on those nightstands without messing up the cloth, but somehow she did.   We are still searching for the single missing ear plug.  This one has not revealed itself....yet.

Abbie is definitely keeping her status intact as my most expensive dog.