A story from Hannah about Marley And Me; Hank posted A story from Hannah van der Eerden about My Dog Tucker posted 12/29/2008 Sorry i am a little girl so i don't know how to upload photos. Now i will get on to the story... I got Tucker when i was in 4, and he's my best friend Tucker is a Bouvier des Flanders. He's black beautiful and loyal. Tucker is a very protective dog so if i were a burglar i would not try to break in! Back to the story. When we went to look at Tucker at some guys house we didn't chose Tucker he chose us. He lied down on my lap when he was a few months old but he was super heavy. I COULDN'T TAKE IT! After we looked at him we got to know him so we said "He's ares" We took him home and taught him a couple of tricks... We loved him more than ever and we still do... Now i don't really want to get in to those long life stories i just wanna tell you some funny things Tucker has done. About 2 years after we got Tuck we new he would do anything for us including protect us... One day my dad came home late when he walked in the door everyone was asleep- Everyone except Tucker that is. So my dad walks in the door and Tucker comes pounding down the stairs and slams him into the door. While my dad is trying to calm him my mom is rushing down the stairs worried sick. She pulls Tucker off of my dad and then it was all fine. Poor guy... When tucker gets into the snow Snowballs attach to him. On Christmas day there were so many snowballs on the carpet you wouldn't believe it. As you see Tuck is a loyal and caring dog which made us so scared when he got ill. Tucker had a horrible paw infection. It was so bad he couldn't even get up the stairs so i slept down stairs all night with him. That just goes to show you how much i love him. A story from Jimmy Ettele about My Lucky Penny posted 03/12/2010 Growing up I had a dog. Puffy. Don't be fooled by the name. Anyone who knew Puffy knew he was Evel Knievel, Andrew Zimmern, and Steve-O rolled into 15 pounds of a black and grey scruffy fur in a mutt's body. He had a taste for Schmidt's beer. He was fond of devouring the mail offerings of the United States Postal Service. He could make a standing high jump of about 5' and he had an affinity for jumping onto moving motorcycles driving down our alley(then chewing off his cast from the broken leg he suffered). Puffy was one of a kind. A true dog's dog. But since the day I came home from Cub Scouts(Pack 315. Stoney Creek representin'.) and was told by my mother Puffy had been put to sleep as I was learning how to tie yet another knot(my parents skipped the whole, "Puffy had to go to a farm" routine with my sister and I and went right for brutal honesty) I have longed for another dog. No matter if you're a confessed 'cat' person, own some sort of glorified rodent like a ferret(one evolutionary step away from the common squirrel if you ask me), or collect exotic fish from the Far East that have been raised by a clan of Ninja, there is nothing quite like the lap of a dog's tongue, their excitement when seeing you walk through the door, or the way their hind leg goes when you pet then right under the rib cage(you know the spot). Try getting a samurai fish to do that with their fin? So, for the better part of 22 years, on and off I have contemplated owning a dog. Getting married only heightened the fever. My wife had also grown up with a dog(Princess) and for as long as we have been together, we have at least casually made conversation about getting our own tail wagging canine. If Alicia were not bad enough, having kids pushed the Mercury to the boiling point. To attempt to quell their hunger for a puppy, we got a cat. Alley Cat(you can blame my wife for the name). Nice enough. Friendly. Good with the kids but a cat. Only to be bothered when she's ready. Not so in to chasing tennis balls around the yard. A lap from her tongue is like getting kissed by a piece of 40 grit sandpaper. Now I love my cat, but she is no dog. The Alley Cat novelty wore out the moment my kids realized she was no dog either. I continued to hem. I continued to haw. As much as a furry new best buddy would be fantastic, I could not see laying out several hundred dollars for an animal that spends the better part of their days licking their genitalia(my admiration and awe not withstanding) and chewing my Nike's. I was also leery of 'saving' a dog. My luck, I would have saved a dog from the Michael Vick Collection. So I kept holding the females in my house at bay(Besides the pressure from my own family, our development has more dogs walking around in it than a college campus has coeds with tribal tattoos on their lower backs. The pressure was everywhere.). The bay dried up this past Sunday. While Emma laid sprawled out on the sofa working on a nap and I tried to catch the last few innings of the Phillies and Red Sox, Alicia and Hannah went grocery shopping at Redner's. Among the fresh produce and sliced thin cold cuts for sale there was also a puppy. Although we did not know her yet, what we were soon to discover was we would know her. A printed sheet with the puppy's face and a phone number was pinned to the cork board hanging on the wall next to the Express Aisle(You know these boards, every grocery chain in America has one. A place where you can find guitar lessons hanging next to a Strawberry Festival advertisement.). So as they walked out, Alicia saw the ad, saw the unbelievably low price for a 14 week old Yellow Labrador Retriever, saw the dog's face, looked at Hannah's wide eyes, memorized the phone number with lightning speed and broke a small number of traffic laws attempting to get home to tell me about a 14 week old Yellow Lab for sale. While the idea of this dog was an instant hit to the female members of my house, I had my reservations. My girls(Alicia included) were transfixed in reverie about all the reasons people loved dogs so much. I had visions of snow filled below freezing early morning walks with a paper towel and Ziploc bag. I saw myself emptying bottles of Resolve onto my carpet. I would not be won over so easily with such egregious displays of pleading and gushing. I am a man of my convictions. So I did what any man who was strong with his convictions and firm in his manhood would do...I called the owner(as if I really had a choice). The owner told us to come over that day and see the dog. So I gathered the troops and told them if they were so intent on getting this puppy, if we were to get her(if...yeah, more like when) all were going to have to cough up some money to buy her. We shook ceramic piggy banks, emptied our car change holders, I put in my container of change I had had since my Millersville University days and we headed off to a Coinstar. I proceeded to empty out years worth of coins(and pick out the Crayola Factory coins Emma contributed) into the Coinstar and at the tally's end we had enough to buy one 14 week old Yellow Labrador Retriever(who would have thought my former laundry and emergency Natural Light beer money would be used like this). Before the sun fell on Sunday night we were at her house and petting what would soon be our dog. By the time we left, we had a handshake agreement on the puppy and the next day after work I would be picking her up to take her to her new home(that sound you may have heard were my convictions going right out the window). I brought our new puppy home on Monday night. We had decided on her name too. Short of lifting the sofa cushions to find loose change, this dog had been bought with a lot of coins and no coin more prevalent in our collection than the penny(like 2500 of them). So Monday afternoon around 5:30, we welcomed home our Penny. And in the briefest of time that she has been apart of our family, we are all so happy and so lucky to have our bright shiny Yellow Labrador Penny. A story from Crysta about Hannah the Husky posted 03/26/2010 I just finished reading Marley & Me, and as you've heard a million times I was touched. About two years ago, I purchased my first dog, a Siberian Husky, whom I named Hannah, as she was born right in the middle of Hurricane Hannah. Little did I know how true she would be to a hurricane... I first saw her picture on a breeder's website and was in love. I cleared my bank account to have that precious little puppy. Training began immediately...but here we are two years later and it hasn't sunk in. I cannot begin to tell you how much money I have put into building fences...and reinforcing the fence after she broke it, and heightening the fence after she jumped it, and putting concrete around the yard so she couldn't dig under it...the dog is an energetic mess. My solution was to take her for long walks. Only, I didn't realize (though I should have) that a sled dog would drag me around my neighborhood for 5 hours only to be upset when I managed to drag her inside when we happened to get near my house for the umpteenth time since the walk began. I am constantly returning from work to find all kinds of chewed up objects. Paper is her big fetish. I once came home to several twenty dollar bills shredded to bits on my living room. I haven't the slightest clue as to where she found them. But, it broke my heart that she did. What a waste. My proudest moment, however, was about two days ago. I was about half way through your book at the time, and I returned from work to find it (to my horror) lying on the floor in my bedroom. "Not this one!" I groaned with angst. "I haven't finished it yet! There is a bookshelf FULL of finished books in here! Why this one??" And then, my spirit livened when I noticed a lack of shredded paper bits on the floor. "She just drug it out," I thought. "Something else caught her attention. She didn't chew it up!" And, upon further investigation, I found that she didn't chew it up, but had full on swallowed something like 40 pages of the book. I was horrified! But, as I flipped through the pages, I realized just how thoughtful my dog was. She had eaten only pages that I had already read. Thrilled that I could finish your book, I gave her a treat and told her in my sweetest voice what a naughty girl she had been, and settled in to finish it before she could come back for seconds. If that isn't irony, I do not know what is. My dog ate a book about a dog who spent his entire life eating inanimate objects, and destroying property for the fun of it. But, I wouldn't trade my mess of a dog for anything in the world. Thank you for sharing the wonderful life you had with your beloved pet. It's a story I won't soon forget. A story from Hannah Luo about Lululu~ posted 07/25/2010 (a single note:I'm writing this story as my Mom's aunt, whose story is to share) I didn't remember when or where or who told me, that all of those whom I love is going to leave me. And somehow that was , right. I used to own two dogs, Babe and her son Lulu. Because of that (stupid) rule in our apartment I had to give Babe away to my niece's family, since they always wanted a dog to keep. Then I gave all my heart to Lulu, the little mutt who howls like a wolf and is cowardly enough to be scared by a cat. Inherited, what do you do about that? Despite all the howling and hiding and mischieving (He even ate those fresh-baked pancakes while I was out! Guess how I knew? Paw-prints on the table of course.), he was with me all through the five years he lived. When I divorced with my husband, when my daughter got married, when she left China with her husband to the US... Everything. What he brought is endless and endless of happiness, even though sometimes I had to take the stick and chase after him until he admitted he did all those things by crawling under the sofa. I should have known it was a bad ending for him when I dicided to put him in the vet's while I visit my daughter. That day I was back the vet told me, the second day I left, Lulku was off the leash and got crashed by a car. She even offered the video tape but I refused, considering I wante to remember him in one piece with no blood. I just kept watching those clips of him swimming in the little pond, we laughed a lot in the video. My MSN icon is Lulu's photograph since he died. I didn't get another dog, and now that I'm living in Michigan, I would ask them to let me see Babe when we video-talk. I just hope Babe will be fine in the next few years and then die peacefully. "Come Lulu" "Oh you little bad boy, lululu" Lululu~ A story from Hannah about Hannah Luo's lulu posted 07/27/2010 Miss U Lulu! Read More Stories > Begin Sharing Your Story >