I must admit, this is a pretty cool story. My daughter Hannah used some of her Christmas money to purchase a Build-A-Bear Workshop stuffed animal, a husky dog. If you have kids and don't know about BABW - you gotta check it out. The experience we had at the store was pretty cool. My daughter picked out her unstuffed, unnamed dog and a little stuffed heart. She then brought these lifeless items to the sweet lady that was running the stuffing machine. The lady had my daughter run through a whole routine to properly warm and start the heart beating before stuffing into the dog and bringing it to life. It was sweet. My daughter then went through the procress of naming the dog to produce an official birth certificate. She named her new adopted pet - "Shasta". And everybody lived happily every after... until...

Well, those of you who know us, know that we have two new dachshund puppies: Lucy and Lilly. We love them dearly, however, being the puppies that they are, they love to chew on things. Unfortunately we left the puppies alone in the house while we all went outside. One of the puppies thought it might be fun to play with Shasta while we were out. When we came back in we found Shasta missing part of his bottom jaw, his tongue and part of his nose. As you can imagine, this created a great deal of sadness. We quickly assessed Shasta's wounds and determined that they were beyond our ability to properly care for. Mommy immediately went to work looking for a doctor. On the BABW website they say that you can bring your animals in to any store for repair. We took our sad daughter and her injured pet to the shop where we bought him. They were so good. They told her that Shasta needed to go the Build-A-Bear Hospital to see Dr. Robin. They also showed her a one-eyed bear that was brought in earlier that day that would be keeping Shasta company on the trip to the hospital. They said that as soon as he was better they would ship him directly to our house with a full doctor's report on how he did. They are going to do all of that at no charge. Now I won't lie to you, Hannah shed many a crocodile tear having to part with her new pet, but I think she will be OK once she sees her pet all healed up and back in her arms. Way to go Build-A-Bear!