Meet Hannah

Hannah is (1) Randy’s dog, and (2) Zacchaeus’ wife. Hannah came to live with us in the fall of 2006 because Randy, after doing more internet research, decided he’d rather have a rat terrier than another Jack Russell terrier. See, Randy had just lost his JRT Haley to the 55-mile-per-hour road in front of our house. That’s because Haley had followed her “husband”, Zacchaeus, when he escaped for the second day in a row through a hole in the fence.

How did we know it was the second day in a row?

Because AFTER Haley was killed, our roommates told us “oh yeah, the dogs were out yesterday too, we put them back in.” Well, gee thanks, if you had told us that YESTERDAY, we could have found and fixed the hole in the fence YESTERDAY, and we wouldn’t have a dead dog TODAY! (Because I DID find and fix the hole that night, and have not had an escapee since!) Hence the reason we are no longer willing to have roommates!

Anyway Randy is not real demonstrative when it comes to the animals, they are more my thing, but when we went to pick up Haley, she jumped right into his arms, and he spent a lot of time working with her to calm her JRT hyper-ness. Every night when he got home from work and sat at the computer, was her “down time”, learning to sit still and be calm.
Haley with Randy:
So when he got home that night, after she had been hit, he just looked at me and said “you know, I really LIKED that little dog”. It just about broke my heart. That was a LOT coming from him. So I said, “Do you want another one?” (Besides, my boy Zacchaeus STILL needed a wife!)

So, enter Hannah.

She is totally different than Haley, personality-wise and behavior-wise. She came from what we figured after we got there was basically a puppy mill, but after seeing the place we couldn’t leave her there. As a result she was pretty timid and not very well socialized, however she is doing better all the time and one blessing from her background is that she is crate-trained. As it turns out, however, she doesn’t have a very good immune system, as she contracted “valley fever”. So we decided the best thing would be to get her fixed and not breed her after all, but her condition was so poor we opted to wait for the surgery until the meds had done their job and she was in better health, because we weren’t sure she would survive the surgery. We were careful to keep her away from Zacchaeus when she was in heat and researched on the internet to find out that dogs come in heat every six months. She was in heat last August so we figured we had until February before we had to worry about it again. Apparently though her health has messed with her system, because she was finally starting to feel better and all of a sudden in early December – TWO MONTHS ahead of time – she came back in heat. We discovered this because she and Zacchaeus were ... well… nuff said. You can just imagine.

That picture doesn't show it very well, but Hannah standing on her hind legs now resembles a bowling pin, and we are anxiously awaiting pups… after which both mama and papa will be fixed as we have decided to stick with baby donkeys and perhaps, maybe, sometime in the future, Chihuahua pups courtesy of Darci Jean. (And yes that's our jealous little spoiled girl in the last picture, no one can be on a lap without her!)

Hopefully the people that keep trying to steal Zacchaeus from me will be satisfied with his children and I won’t have to worry any more!