I’m only 14 years young, and I’ve only had one loss of a dog in my lifetime, but this story really got me. My dad got it for me for Christmas, and we went on a roadtrip after that- I read 100 pages there, 100 pages back. I smiled, cried, & laughed throughout this whole book, and the entire time I thought of my doggies. I have always loved dogs, but after reading this story, I really put a different point of view into the life of my dogs.

After the loss of my first golden retriever, Bandit, I was only 11 years old. Yes, I cried, and I was extremely sad, but I knew we needed another dog to lifen things up. We got a golden/sheperd mix named Sunny, and he was a handful I’m telling you. Bandit died in May of 2003, and we got Sunny some time later. Then, in November of 2003, my mom died. We went up to NY for her funeral (we were originally from there) and I stayed up a little bit longer then the rest of my family. I came home, and Sunny was gone. I asked my dad what happened, and he said we couldn’t handle him any more, so he gave them to a shelter (but I made sure the shelter didn’t kill the animals). I was crushed, especially because of my mom’s death.

In January, I wasn’t getting much better in the greiving process, and I knew we needed a new canine friend around the house. My dad was set on getting a golden, so I told him there were golden puppies at petsmart (even though i had no clue if they had them or not :]). We took off there, and he realized after we got there I was lying about the goldens. He wanted to leave, but I fell in love with a black lab/austrailian cattledog mix puppy. She had been thrown out of a car window when she was a pup, I thought that was horrible. I told my dad we had to have her, so he gave in, and eventually fell in love with her too. Her name is Sasha, shes 3, and shes still apart of our family.

About two years later, I was searching on the web for goldens, because I knew my dad was missing Bandit. I knew he deffinately didn’t want another dog, but I still wanted to look. I found golden retriever pups about a half hour away from where we lived, and I convined my dad to just go look (I have no idea how I did it, but I did). We got there, and my dad couldn’t leave without one. We weren’t sure how Sasha would act, so we told them we would take him home and see how things went. They went great, and now we have a 1 year old boy, named Kaiden. Sasha and Kaiden get along great, and Sprite and Pepsi greatly remined me of them.

Thanks for reading this, and have a happy new year! Give Pepsi and Griffen my love.

Kathleen from NC