Homeschooling

Errors in Judgement

March 26, 2019 By Annette1 4 Comments

When I was thinking about what to do for E, I almost chose the English Lop, the problem is, I have no pictures of an English Lop and other than the remarkably loveable few I’ve met… I don’t know all the ins and outs of raising them. 🙂 Ergo I changed my focus to talk about errors in judgement. We all make them. It’s SO not fun to do so, but errors teach us something if we’ve a mind to pay attention.

Errors vary from the “oops” that wasn’t smart to the “oh man…that was SO not good…hit yourself on the head and vow to never to that again” variety. Working towards the oops rather than devastating is always a step forward.

Small Mistakes

Letting sentiment rule.

I have a three strikes and you are out rule. My thinking, over 14 years of raising rabbits, is that if every other rabbit is healthy and doing what they should be, and this one rabbit isn’t something is wrong. Problem solve it. Watch the rabbit. Adjust feed. Try again. And if things aren’t right after three cycles, it’s not going to be right so let them go. SOMETIMES I get attached to a rabbit. It never turns out good. So I keep fighting the “letting sentiment rule” mistake. And probably will until I stop having my bunnies.

Picking the wrong bunny to hold back.

Occasionally, let the sentiment mistake above, I forget what I am aiming to breed. Tricolour lops with chocolate and blue. I let other factors influence my decisions. I need to stop doing that. If I want to get to point Z down the road, the decisions I make now actually matter.

Selling off mom, before having a replacement.

Sometimes I have a doe that I adore and she’s good enough to keep babies from. I end up thinking, okay… person B wanted her and I have this half-grown youngster (or two) almost ready to breed, let her go. Do that and then someone comes in and steals those half-grown youngsters. Or a wind-storm happens that stresses them out. Or a possum comes through (let’s not go there) BAD memories that! Now I hold on to them until I’ve a grown daughter/son because Person B will wait and then perhaps I’ll get a back up.

Big Mistakes

Tiredness Hit

I made one such mistake the week of March 7, going out to shelve babies for the night and accidentally leaving a cage door open. I’ve done this in the past though I never intend to. Always happens when I’m really tired and went out too late. Anyways, this time the doe jumped out of the cage during the night. Six feet to the ground. I found her in the morning as was totally relieved to do so and thought all was well. Until I watched her “NOT MOVE”. Not moving is SO not a good thing. Two things it could be… broken back, or injured nerves. Only time would tell. Fix: Help the doe, put in a double check system for all cage doors at night.

Lack of Quarantine.

This was a mistake I made early one. Bought a rabbit and ASSUMED it was healthy. It wasn’t. As a result I lost an entire batch of young rabbits, all because one seemingly healthy rabbit wasn’t. Fix: quarantine for one month minimum with mild stressors added.

Feed

How you feed rabbits is actually rather important. They are sensitive to mycotoxins (moulds) and feed changes. Have mould they stop eating, too quick with the feed changes and upset stomachs result. Fix: no mouldy hay, no feed with corn, slow feed changes. If it is suspect just throw it out.

Trusting the wrong person

One time I went on vacation and someone asked if they could bunny sit. I said okay and then FOOLISHLY paid them as they would be gone before I got back. They left three days into my two week vacation…. how to feed cats, bunnies and birds when I’m more than 10 hours away… GAH. That was a mess. Fortunately mom and a friend helped out. Could have been totally devastating for my herd.

Letter E Link Up

Each week we will be linking up with the hosts of Blogging Through the Alphabet. Please visit some of these other blogs to get things like book lists, vegan recipes, and wonderful places to visit, just to name the topics I can think of off the top of my head.

Learning Household Management

March 20, 2019 By Annette1 4 Comments

One of the things I’ve been pondering as my lad gets older is learning to manage a house. There are things as natural as can be to teach him…. like sweeping a floor, taking out the garbage, doing dishes and what not. These are jobs easily shown and given to a lad to do.

Not all jobs are like that though. Cleaning toilets, cooking complete meals, understanding personal finance, maintaining things like furnaces and appliances, and so much more. Sometimes I wonder how to do it all. I don’t think I’m alone in that. 🙂

Learning to Let him Learn

Today I felt a bit of an idiot you know? 🙂 My son was going to make homemade mac and cheese, the oven baked kind. I found him a recipe and then I started remembering how hard it was for me to make a white sauce….and I shouldn’t have….but I did. I kinda took over the “how to make a white sauce part.”. What I SHOULD HAVE done was wait and let him figure it out or ask for help. Why I didn’t? I don’t know.

The lad and I were talking about it. He had a recipe and he knows how to follow one, and here I kept messing around with him and it. He couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just let him do it. In the end we basically decided that I was just being a mom learning to let a capable teen learn skills on his own. I haven’t done this before. He’s my first ever teen so I’m bound to make mistakes.

We’ve agreed. Next time I’ll find a recipe for him (until he’s comfortable finding his own) and then just let him run with it.

Plans Moving Forward

In a household there are many chores, jobs, duties that need doing to keep the household running smoothly. I broached the idea to my lad that I’d make a schedule and we’d switch routines every week. That, didn’t go over well. He’s a routine oriented young man so switching things around causes too much stress.

We decided that one day every other week he’ll cook supper. The opposite week I’d pick a chore and say, today can you do the laundry, whatever bin is full. We divide our clothes in black, medium, reds and whites. I do a load whenever a basket is full.

I’ll do the same with other tasks like cleaning the bathroom… toilet and tub not just the counter tops. Weeding the lettuce patch. Trimming back the grass from the sidewalk, and all the mirade of things that need doing. By the time he is 18 he won’t be wondering how to maintain a house any longer, and will have had exposure to everything that needs to be done.

Personal Finance

Two months ago he opened a bank account. We had thought about just doing on-line banking with him, but reconsidered knowing the benefit of a personal touch when learning new skills. It was great decision since this past week he deposited all his savings. He learned that putting all the denominations together is better than dividing all the money into groups of $50 regardless if bill or coin. The tellers took their time explaining why group denominations and coins by type/amount is preferrable.

Over the summer I’ll be walking him through how to keep to a budget. We’ll do one month together of this is what we spend money on, this is what we have to spend, how can we make our dollars count best? Hands on, walking side by side learning, it’s the best way you know?

SchoolhouseTeachers has a personal finance course that we plan to take as well. Making sure I cover everything that needs covering. There is so much goodness on SchoolhouseTeachers, they are getting better all time time. Take advantage of their offerings if you haven’t yet!

Discussing Death

March 19, 2019 By Annette1 4 Comments

I was struggling with what to do for D and happened to wonder aloud what I should do. My 13 year old immediately popped up with “Death! Mom, you should talk about how you handle it when a rabbit dies.” I got to thinking it was a pretty good idea, so today we’ll be discussing death regarding raising rabbits.

Happens to everyone

I don’t know of any rabbit breeder who hasn’t experience death in their rabbitry. Now I know, I just finished talking to you about culling. I’m not talking about the deliberate death that you either choose or is needful, I’m speaking to the unexpected death that happens.

Every rabbit breeder, unless they are extremely fortunate, has experienced unexpected death in their rabbitry. It’s part of dealing with prey animals.

What is a prey animal?

The term prey refers to an animal that is sought, captured, and eaten by a predator. Rabbits in the wild are eaten by hawks, foxes, coyotes, weasels, possums, raccoons and more. I’ve even seen a squirrel noshing on an injured rabbit. If often seems like everything wants to enjoy rabbit for lunch.

AND a smart rabbit knows this. They know not to trust a thing around them because lunch happens and they don’t want to be it.

They know not to trust a thing around them because lunch happens and they don't want to be it. Click To Tweet

Oh.. why do I bring that up? As prey animals, rabbits hide illness extremely well. If you know what to look for you can tell if your bunny is not okay, but if you don’t know the rabbit, it’s harder to tell.

Unexpected Death Happens

Unexpected death happens for a variety of reasons: Shock, illness, predation, and accidents. Different emotions happen as the result of death. I’ll talk about each of these areas and the end result in my thoughts and emotions.

Shock

Shock for rabbit can come due to a move to a new home, sudden unexpected noise in the night, change in the weather, change in environment and even feed changes.

Smart rabbit breeders know that if you buy a rabbit, you want to breed that rabbit, almost right away. You put new bunny into quarantine, and grab whatever bunny you can afford to lose (of the opposite gender) and breed that rabbit immediately, putting it into quarantine as well. That way if new bunny dies unexpectedly (they are prone to do so in the first month) then at least you have the genetics you paid for!

Two summers ago I put a solid roof on the rabbitry. This caused a doe to go off feed and I had to foster out her litter of kits. One would think a new roof wouldn’t be an issue, but for this doe it was something she couldn’t handle. Another doe went from being a sweet kind doe to a skittery one scared of everything. It was a needful change, but these two buns couldn’t cope. It saddens me when something like this mess with bunny heads.

This spring we had a howler of a wind storm come through. Three days of unrelenting wind and noise. It caused a young buck to go off feed, and then I lost seven weanlings in about four days. One after the other they simply stopped eating. It SUCKS big time. Promising young animals stressed out by wind, noise and cold drafts that you do your best to protect them from but it’s hard to predict who will get hit. Two cages out of twenty that most likely had a cold draft hit them. Straw and added boxes not withstanding.. I can’t force them to use what I give them.

With most animals, going slow with feed changes prevents shock or tummy upset. With rabbits they need to develop the gut flora to deal with the change in diet. This is why you NEED to go slowly with rabbits when changing their feed, particularly if it’s big change.

Illness

Rabbits are notorious for hinding illness. It’s in their own best interest as a prey animal to not show obvious signs of distress. A rabbit owner needs to educate themselves on signs of illness. Even so, sometimes rabbits die without an obvious signs of illness.

I had a buck once, GORGEOUS animal. Eating, drinking, pooping, peeing, eager to breed. Next day he was dead. I talked to a vet once, and without doing an autopsy, suggested a heart attack. And not to be too surprised if a heart attack is why an apparently healthy animal is suddenly dead.

This is not something you can predict. It just bites you know? When an apparently healthy animal is found dead. It frustratingly sad.

Predation

Did you know that I HATE rats? Wild rats. I simply despise them. They nibble off bunny feet, if they get into a cage they will carry off newborns and frighten momma, and they poop and pee on everything causing mould problems. I had a distressing two winters of trying to get rid of them when the horse barn next door was torn down and the rats moved in my shed. Just awful awful awful. Now I see them, I trap them immediately. No second chances.

Next on my list are coons and possums. Both are seasonal, spring and fall. I no longer grow corn as that brings the coons in. If they can reach in and grab a baby… it’s not a pretty sight, and I won’t go into detail. Possums in the spring are youngsters finding their own digs, and in the fall it’s adults fattening up for winter. Removal of offenders is a given. NOTE: if trapping a possum and moving it.. don’t tell anyone, and move them at night, under cover, in an open bed vehicle. They STINK.

It frustrates me when I have the bunnies secured and then some bozo hops the fence and steals one and/or deliberately or possibly accidentally leaves a cage door open and a bunny escapes to be killed by a predator, shock, or on the road. IMMENSELY frustrated to the point of anger. Like HOW DARE THEY! Thieves and idiots.. stay away from my bunnies.

Accidents

Accidents happen. Both by me and by the bunnies.

A baby popping out of the box and chill to death, leaves me sad and becoming a problem solver. Babies pop out of boxes, ergo now why I shelve my babies in the winter. I don’t want them popping out and freezing.

Leaving a cage door open at night when tired and forgetful and a bunny hops out and injures themselves. That rabbit could have easily killed herself by breaking her back. That makes me angry at myself and vowing not to let that happen again.

The fore-a-mentioned windstorm? One result was a young kit with a broken leg. I assume from momma landing on it in a panic over noise. Fortunately kits heal well. 🙂 But if it was a bad break… it’s a death sentence.

Letter D Link Up

Add Board Games to Your Homeschool Routine

March 16, 2019 By Annette1 5 Comments

I love having people guest post on my blog. Today I want to thank Tyler for visiting with us. I hope you enjoy Tyler’s post.

Add Board Games to Your Homeschool Routine

One of our goals in homeschooling since the start has been to find a way to make it fun. My wife and I both went to public school and we knew we didn’t want homeschooling to be ‘public school at home’. However, we weren’t sure what we DID want it to look like. Starting out we were planning fun activities each day. The kids loved it and we could see they were having fun while learning, but we quickly realized we would be burnt out on creating this fun learning environment long before they learned everything they needed to know. So we started looking for something fun (and easy!) to supplement our homeschooling activities. Enter gameschooling.

What is GameSchooling?

Put simply, gameschooling is homeschooling using games to teach. For us, gameschooling is primarily board games, but also includes some outdoors games. Adding board games to our homeschool routine has been an amazing change for our house. For the kids, board games have kept learning fun and engaging. As parents, gameschooling has taken a lot of the stress out of homeschool planning, because we know board games are there to help us teach or reinforce our homeschooling efforts.

How to Add (or Increase) Games to Your Homeschool Routine?

Fitting board games into an already full day of homeschooling can be a challenge. Here are our top five ways to fit games into our homeschool schedule:

1. Pick a Subject and Find a Board Game A great way to get started using board games in your homeschool activities is to simply pick a subject you are working on and find a board game to reinforce it. Looking for some inspiration? Check out this article on 100 things kids learn from board games, with game recommendations for each!

2. Add a Daily Game Time

Another option to consider if you’re looking to add some gameschooling to your days is to set aside a certain time each day for board games. A lot of modern board games can be played in fifteen to forty five minutes. This makes them a perfect activity when the kids need a break. We love to play board games right before lunch when the kid’s focus starts to be more concerned with what is in the fridge then the topic at hand.

3. Start a Family Game Night

Rather than cram board games into your school day, try out a family board game night. One of my favorite memories growing up was playing board games as a family. Board game night was the one time all the hecticness of work, school, and other activities seemed to fall away and we were able to enjoy family time playing board games. Little did I know I was learning at the same time! If you have a family with a large age range, check out this list of the 10 best games that preschoolers through adults will all love.

4. Use board Games to Wind Down for Bed

I know I can’t be the only one who has kids who seem to get more and more awake the closer bedtime gets. Board games are a great tool to burn some of that excess brain energy off and help your kids wind down for bed. We try to avoid silly games, or active games right before bed, and instead target something like sleeping queens or robot turtles. These games hit the right balance of challenging without being too complex for them to focus on right before bed in our house.

5. Travel with Board Games

Traveling is a great time to try out gameschooling. Regular homeschool activities are difficult when your away from home. The combination of not having your regular homeschool tools at your disposal and kids being excited about traveling is not ideal. If you pick the right board games, they’re easy to play in a car, on a plane, or where ever you might be traveling and they won’t take up much space in your luggage! To get you started, here’s a list of our favorite kids board games to travel with.

Start your Gameschooling Journey!

I hope these tips can help you start (or expand) your gameschooling and see what a powerful homeschool tool it can be. I’d love to hear from you in the comments! If you already gameschool, what is your favorite way to fit board games in your day? If you haven’t started yet, which of these tips will you try?

Tyler blogs at kidsloveboardgames.com. Kids Love Board Games focuses on the benefits of playing family board games, gameschooling, as well as board game recommendations and reviews. Sign up for Kids Love Board Games newsletter and follow Kids Love Board Games on Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Junk Drawer Physics

March 13, 2019 By Annette1 2 Comments

Learning while doing is by far the best way to cement material. Junk Drawer Physics is filled with 50 different experiments and builds to help the learner understand physics. Understand potential energy, vibrations, magnetism and more by creating toys and small machines as well as conducting experiments.

About the Book and Author

Bobby Mercer has been a high school physics teacher for over 20 years. He takes that knowledge and turns it into practical, hands-on experiments. His assumption is that you have what you need right in your own home.

Turn a plastic cup into a Pinhole Camera using waxed paper, a rubber band, and a thumbtack. Build a swing wave machines using a series of washers suspended on strings from a yardstick. Use a cork, string, and water-filled plastic bottle to create a simple Accelerometer. Or construct your own Planetarium from an empty potato chip canister, construction paper, scissors, and a pin.

What you Get

Six chapters divided over 194 pages.

Chapter titles are

Forces and Motion
Energy
Sound and Waves
Light
Electricity and Magnetism
Fluids and Pressure

50 Experiments which include builds such as a cork accelereomter. ball blaster, straw oboe, Pringles Planetarium, No-touch race car, and ketchup diver. The experiments all vary from each other which I really like. You know how sometimes you can get a STEM book where they say x number of projects and then you find it’s project a that becomes b and in the end it just feels like one project with different steps to it. Junk Drawer Physics doesn’t do that.

One of the projects we made was the air horn. We found the instructions very easy to follow and because we were using random items from around the house we were able to make two different ones that sounded quite different from each other.

Because they were different from each other we were able to expand our knowledge base as well, comparing the lower and higher notes we made. This would be fascinating to do with a larger group and then see if we could make our own air horn musical group. 🙂 haha

Most of the time pictures are used to help convey expectations for the project, but as you can see above, sometimes simple diagrams are used.

There is always a materials list that proceeds the directions for any given experiment.

The close of the experiment tells you why it happened, or what principle is being demonstrated. This gives you time, if you choose not to read the explanation, to come up with your own explanation using deductive and logical reasoning.

My Thoughts

Today my son woke me up asking “Mom, for my hands on stuff today, can I do experiments out of Junk Drawer”? Fridays is our “hands on plus do what’s important for you” day. So for him to choose Junk Drawer Physics over taking apart electronics, working on his crossbow, or any of his other projects that he is working on, tells you what he thinks of it.

Easy experiments that he can do on his own, figure out on his own, and if he can’t, tells him what he needs to know. Makes it a winner in my eyes.

Age level? It’s hard to say. To me these experiments are great for youth 7 years old and up. I’ve been doing science with my lad since he was very little so I have full confidence in his abilities. Although, I have seen in the grade 9/10 science courses I mark that, not all students have that same level of confidence.

It would be easy to make these experiments harder for highschool students by having them to define what principle the experiment is showing before revealing the science behind it. Younger students might need to have the answer given to them, or be asked questions to help them figure it out on their own.

Junk Drawer Physics: 50 Awesome Experiments that don’t cost a thing.
Bobby Mercer
Chicago Review Press.
Softcover, 204 pages,
Physics, Science, Experiments,
Reviewed for Chicago Review Press.

C is for Culling Well

March 12, 2019 By Annette1 7 Comments

I will freely tell you that this isn’t an easy topic, but it is a necessary one. When you raise animals as livestock, breeding and/or show animals culling is a necessary part of the equation. I breed rabbits (love the hobby) and have learned the importance of this vital task.

What does Culling Mean?

Culling means that you are reducing the animals in your herd. You do this for a variety of reasons: Perhaps you need a meal for your table or your pets, you have a sick animal, you have too many animals, or just need to cut back. Life choices affect the animals under your care. This refers to when you are raising animals with an intended purpose in mind, not animals you have as pets. Rabbits, like many other animals can serve both as livestock and as pets. Using the correct terminology for how they used is important.

Methods to Cull

There are two proper methods to cull.

Sell the animal. In my opinion only animals that you believe to be healthy should be sold. This means good temperament, no genetic defects and no health problems. Unloading sick animals on someone else should never be done.
Kill the animal. You do this by the quickest, most painless method possible. I am not going to discuss those methods here. Always have a backup method. Sometimes your primary method won’t work and causing unnecessary pain to an animal under care is wrong.

Improper method is to

Let an animal under your care slowly die because you aren’t caring for it properly…. whether that be from disease or lack of care
Releasing it into the wild alive.

Desire to save from Death

One of the things I run into on rabbit forums is this desire to save every animal from death. I don’t where it comes from. I sorta understand it, because honestly rabbits are cute. They are! Rabbits make excellent pets or livestock. They are great as companion animals, show animals, working animals, and food animals. Regardless of their purpose they are cute, easy to handle (usually), and are just lovely beasties.

But.. They aren’t always. Sometimes they get illnesses that never go away. You can make the illness hide, but not cure it (pasturella), or have Genetic defects (malocclusion). Sometimes they injure themselves badly (broken back, teeth). Other times they get an illness that is too expensive to treat, or even with treatment leads to an animal with a compromised immune system (enteritis). Occasionally you get a rabbit with a nasty temper. I am currently dealing with that right now. This doe wants to bite and attack me, and she regularly nips her kits for no readily apparent reason. Temperamentally, not the kind of rabbit to pet out or to continue to work with lest she cement that character flaw in my herd.

Never to be Sold

These animals should NEVER be sold.. in my opinion. Why? Well part of my opinion is that I used to work in rescue. I know what happens with rabbits with poor health in the hands of pet people. I do. It’s not a good picture. Rabbits slowly starving because their bad teeth are clipped once a month. Rabbits developing complications from hidden illness. Bunnies with eyes perpetually running and developing skin lesions or going blind as a result.

A secondary reason to not sell unhealthy animals, particularly those with an illness that hides. If you watch ads on any site that allows the selling of animals you will find numerous rabbits, many of them coming out of pet homes. People will often breed their pet rabbits together without knowing you shouldn’t breed weepy eye bunny to snot nosed bunny. The end result? Young rabbits with a compromised immune system. That’s not good for rabbits long term. Just isn’t.

If you breed rabbits DO NOT sell unhealthy animals. Not to the pet public and not to your fellow breeders. Just don’t.

What animals to Sell

Animals that are healthy with good temperament, can be sold for a variety of reasons. These rabbits can be sold as pets, breeders, companion animals, food, and more.

It helps other rabbits. If rabbits with health issues are dispatched humanely, you keep that rabbit out of the genetic pool. A rabbit with strong genetics will hardly ever get ill. Strong immune systems and genetics are what we need in rabbits. Not coddling of ill animals, with their potential to pass on their poor genetics.

Kill the Animal

Humanely culling an animal that is not in peak condition is the best thing you can do for that animal and any future rabbits you may have. Killing an animal when you have need for it is fulfilling it’s purpose. Rabbits are prey animals, and treating them as such is not a bad thing.

You need to cull humanely and calmly. Always having a back up method at hand. Being able to cull means you can also quickly end suffering, because sometimes injuries happen, or illnesses strike hard. Do you want an animal you care for to suffer?

Culling an animal doesn’t mean it is a waste. Raptor rescues, snake owners, raw feeders of cats, dogs and other animals, zoos and animal sanctuaries will gladly take your animals. You can eat them yourself or feed them to your own pets. if you can’t find an outlet you can bury them deep (letting them return to the soil) or bring them to a forest for wild animals to enjoy. No waste, just a well cared for rabbit right to the very end.

Sorrows and Joys

I have had the misfortune of having to cull babies when momma over cleaned them taking off a foot or when a baby is born wrong (it happens, you just don’t rebreed the parents). I’ve had rabbits do a crazy kamikaze leap out of my arms and break their back. Windstorms come creating lots of noise and fright and sometimes rabbits don’t cope well with that. You need to end that pain and suffering as quickly as you can.

I have also had the joy of sending a rabbit off to a new home, owners grinning with delight. Experienced the expressed gratitude of a large snake owner when he finds me saying “wow.. now I can feed my big girl properly”. The joy of seeing my son’s cat do better on an all protein diet. The pleasure in helping the family budget with a home-raised meal. These are all good things.

Cull your animals well. It’s an important part of raising rabbits.

B is For Baby Bunnies

March 5, 2019 By Annette1 5 Comments

Do you see how I did it? Two b’s for this second letter of the alphabet! Today we are going to talk about all things baby bunny!

First it starts with introducing one male bunny (a buck) and one female bunny (a doe). You let them do their thing (which by the way is sometimes super easy, and other times… not so much) BUT that’s a topic for another post (reproduction anyone?)

Then you need to wait. Some people can palpate and others can’t. If you do it wrong you can cause a spontaneous abortion. Anyways, again, topic for another day! 🙂 The easiest thing to do is simply wait. Bunnies usually kindle (have their babies) 31 days after they have mated.

Babies come! WOOT WOOT! Nothing better than day old babies except day three babies or day 21 babies! or… day 28 babies or….. 🙂 Can’t tell I love babies can you?

Newborn babies need to be checked out carefully. Sometimes mama bunnies make mistakes when giving babies their first bath and clean up. Other times babies are born dead. The very odd time they are born with birth defects. Once in a while mama will do a horrible job at building a nest or does WAY too good a job in the middle of summer. Check the babies, the same as you would for any baby, look for all their toes, tails, eyes and nose!

Wait for your day three babies… you can really start to see their colours coming in. The sables will look silvery, the whites and pointeds will look white, and the subtle differences between the lilacs and blues will be apparent. It’s a great day to give them all a very thorough check over.

Week One

I love the pristine whiteness of the light coloured week olds. Aren’t they adorable? 🙂 Did you know that babies have to be checked over every single day? Sometimes a baby will die, or miss a bath from mama and have poop stuck to their bum. They also need to get used to the smell of people, so picking them up every single day keeps them used to you and teaches them not to be frightened.

At about 10 days old their eyes open. I sprinkle a little bit of food into the nest box for them. This gets them started if something untoward happens with mama.

Week Two

They continue growing, you continue checking on this. Week two is when you’ll find out which ones are a bit more high strung. You’ll reach into the box, waking them up and one will start to scream. My lad loves the screamers. He’ll just keep picking them up until they realize that screaming doesn’t get you anywhere, and before long he’ll have them snuggle in his hand. Brings a smile to both our faces! 🙂

At two weeks, Spring through later fall I tip the nestbox on it’s side. This gives babies a solid platform to huddle together on. At this age they still can’t regulate their own body heat. Having a platform helps them stay healthily warm. I give them a creep feeder at this age. In the cold of winter I change out the litter and start shelving them at night.

Week Three

Young rabbits are called kits. They grow like weeds and have an amazing ability to heal quickly from injury or damage. Scratches, nips, broken legs, bug bites and more. Kits can get hurt even in the safety of their own boxes. Keep the fur out of the wound and they heal up right smart.

Week three babies are out of the nestbox and you start to see personalities emerge. The bold, the shy, the curious in your face ones. It’s good!

The nestbox is removed in the warmer weather, tipped during the winter at this stage.

Week Four

Week four babies can be almost impossible to take a picture of. They are SO curious and into things, OR so incredibly shy you can scarce get them to stop trying to hide.

The two kits pictured above were really showing their personalities off. The wee one in the corner just wanted to hide, I had to make sure there were no folds in the cloth. The other one, my son bribed her with a piece of carrot. She was bouncing EVERYWHERE!

If you have a large litter it’s really hard getting a picture of them lined up and looking at you. 🙂 You’ll get bum pictures and sideways bunnies, or young boys coming out to check the camera. It’s a mess.

They are very much like toilet-training toddlers at this stage. Learning to keep themselves clean but often times needing help. Daily checks for poopy butt are a necessity at this age, particularly with my hollands and fuzzies.

Week Five

Curiousity and training starts to play a role. They are getting used to the word STOP and a knock on wood or cage gets them to sit still a moment and start to assess the situation. It gets easier to take a picture or two. Telling genders becomes easier. They are getting smarter and more aware of the world around them.

Week Six

Ears in loppies start dropping more, the girls start to act more like girls, the boys well… they are super sweet but won’t sit still for nothing! Usually takes a bunny threat or two to keep them in line. 🙂 Here I start more seriously evaluating who will stay in the rabbitry and who will need to find a new home. I’m harder on the boys than the girls as the boys tend to stick around a bit longer than the girls and affect all future generations. Kits that are ready to be sold I list (I can do that in Ontario) Stateside the rules are different, there are you legally obliged to hold them until they are eight weeks old.

Week seven-eight

I can’t recall exactly how old this girlie is above. She’s around 8 weeks old. Really starting to show what she’ll look like as an adult. They are pretty self-sufficient at this age. It’s good to watch them grow. 🙂

Others in this series.

A – American Fuzzy Lops