Back in 2008 or so, Morgan and Beth lived out in San Diego in a duplex and wanted to adopt a dog.
We’ve had dogs since 2001 so Morgan was used to having them around.
Beth couldn’t have dogs when she was growing up because her mom was very allergic to dogs.

A friend of theirs, Josh, had rescued a dog and her litter.
Beth and Morgan figured that they could handle a 9 month old puppy and started the process of getting one of the litter.
Then they found out that the litter was 9 weeks old, not 9 months after all.
That difference meant a lot of house training and work that Morgan and Beth weren’t in a position to do.
So they adopted the litter’s mom instead.
That’s how Beth and Morgan got Lulu.

Lulu is a 40 pound black short haired dog with ears that start to point but and flop over about half way up and a black tongue. She has a long body and stumpy little legs.
She’s supposed to be a mix of black lab, put bull and chow.
The black lab and put bull bits are pretty evident but we think that someone just guessed about the chow because we see none on the chow characteristics.
Lulu has a very sweet disposition if she likes you.
She also has a lot of fear-aggression which means that she can be very fierce and barky and snarly if she’s afraid of you.

 It quickly became obvious that Beth was in fact allergic to dogs.
We were surprised at this because Beth showed no signs of allergies around our dogs.
However, she’d only been around our dogs for a few hours at a time and now she was living with Lulu.

Morgan and Beth weren’t able to send Lulu back to Josh and and no one else in California wanted to adopt Lulu.
They quickly found out that folks don’t usually want to adopt black dogs and they really don’t want to adopt pit bulls.
With those 2 black marks against her, Lulu was going nowhere.
 After a couple of months, Pam and I agreed to foster Lulu while trying to adopt her out from Michigan.
We knew that we weren’t allergic and besides, this was only temporary.

Beth packed Lulu into a crate and had her shipped from San Diego to Grand Rapids.
Later that day, Beth got a call from the airline.
Lulu’s flight had a stopover in Chicago and Lulu got out of the crate.
Lulu was lost in Chicago. A few hours later, Beth got another call.
Chicago PD had picked up Lulu and returned her to the airport.
Lulu had missed her connecting flight but they put her on a later flight to Grand Rapids.

At far too late that evening, Pam and I went to meet Lulu at the airport.
After some initial confusion, they brought out a crate with Lulu inside it.
As Pam and I got ready to let Lulu out of the crate, the airport staff told us that we couldn’t let Lulu out of the crate on airport property.
So I got to carry Lulu, and the darn crate, out of the airport to our SUV.

When we got home, I leashed Lulu up and took her to the end of the driveway.
Pam went and got our dogs, Kota and Boomer, and led them to meet Lulu.
Kota and Boomer were each 85 pounds of Golden Retriever.
They came bounding towards Lulu to see what was going on.
Lulu looked to be pretty intimidated but didn’t try the fear-aggression thing.

The 3 dogs got along OK.
Lulu and Boomer soon became best buddies.
After a few months, we’d had no luck adopting out Lulu and Pam soon announced that it would break Boomer’s heart if Lulu left.

Since the Goldens each weighed 85 pounds and Lulu weighted 40 pounds, I started telling folks that we had 2 and a half dogs.

We no longer have Kota and Boomer (R.I.P.) but we still have Lulu.