Meet Snickerdoodle, Blizzard and Pumpkin Spice!
Although I have checked genders, I am not 100% sure and therefore those will be kept secret until a later date, most likely by the end of the week :)

I think it's pretty obvious why we chose the names that we did - it's fall, coming on winter, the holidays are approaching, and every name basically has to do with that and their cute color :) The frosty looks like dirty snow so he gets to be Blizzard. I've been wanting to name an orange baby Pumpkin or Pumpkin Spice for a long time, and we finally have one at the right time! The blue tort otter was either going to be Nutmeg or Snickerdoodle, but I like Snickerdoodle best so that won out! 

*ALL babies are going to be referred to as "he" just for a pronoun more personal than "it". This does not mean they are all boys.*

These babies are so funny! They each have their own distinct personalities already!
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Little Pumpkin Spice is our smallest, and boy is he crazy! He can be sweet too, but typically he's just a spaz. He's constantly jumping off the walls (literally....), and doesn't like to sit still. 

​Blizzard is a sweetie! He's also our biggest! Has been since, like, day 4! He will sit in your hand for a looong time just totally peaceful and relaxed! Bliz can be crazy too, but once you're holding him, he's in heaven :)

​Snickerdoodle is a little of both Blizzard and Pumpkin mixed together - he can be super sweet and loving and then crazy and spastic later on! He loves sleeping upside down in my hand. 

​All three babies are super social and friendly! They're always at the cage door begging for love and pets. All three of them try to hop out of the cage when it's open and onto my lap! They have all hopped into my hand from the cage (in the past, only one baby from a litter would be social and bold enough to do this). They all love licking and showing their affection. Mama loves them and they all love her!

We've been working on posing already with these guys. So far all three of them are naturals! Pumpkin won't hold a pose because, you know...he's crazy....but the other two will! I need to get pictures of it, they're just so cute!

I will try and get a fun video up this week of their cuteness! I was hoping to get weekly videos up on Youtube, but that failed because I don't have access to a computer at home right now. But Youtube videos will be happening again as soon as I get my laptop back! All the Facebook videos I have been putting up recently will go up on Youtube also.

Hey everyone! I finally got a minute after class to post! My computer is still being fixed at home, but the computers at school are awesome so that's what's happening now. Sadly there will be no pictures today, because like I said, I'm using the library computer. Just want to give a quick update.

Saige is bred to Ty! She is due October 16, and palpates positive (I can feel babies in there!). I don't think she will have a big litter though. She's a smaller doe too so all her litters will probably be smaller. 

Rosie's babies are 3 WEEKS OLD today! I know I haven't posted much about them on here....the broken laptop is to blame. On Facebook today I will post pictures and share the names! We (my siblings and I), named the babies like a week ago and even though I'm not positive on genders yet, the names have stuck. Plus they're pretty gender neutral so they could go both ways. I won't share the genders until I'm positive. You can try and guess....but you won't be able to tell based on the names!
Tomorrow or Wednesday after/in between classes I will *try* and share pictures and names of the babies here on the blog. I'll be able to give more in-depth details on why we chose that name for that baby and what that baby's personality is like.

Next month, October (just in case you didn't know), Zuzu will be bred. I will not breed Butterfly until December after the Dec. 5th show. Hopefully Wicket will be bred to Rosie after she weans this litter. 

Butterfly, Ty, and Wicket will be showing this Saturday in Monroe. This is Wicket and Butterfly's last show as juniors! I hope they do well and finish with a bang! Sadly Butterfly is molting her face (of all places), so we'll see....

​I feel like it's been so long since my last post....but I don't think it's been longer than 2 full weeks. Don't worry, I should be getting my laptop back this week, and I won't go that long again if I can help it!

Hey everyone. I posted a mini version of this on Facebook but I thought I'd post here as well. 
So sadly I'm not going to have my computer for the next 2 weeks because it's broken and we're sending it in to get fixed. This means that I will be unable to make Youtube videos, update my website, or blog in that amount of time. I will still be able to respond to messages and emails, post photos to Facebook, and update you all there. I will even be able to post videos to Facebook which I know you'll all like :D

I am starting community college on Monday with the running start program, so I won't be on social media as much as before. I might not post everyday, blogs and videos on Youtube will be less frequent (but both will still be weekly, hopefully), and emails and messages will take a longer time for me to respond to. 
Just want you all to know that none of you are being ignored! This is going to be my busiest season yet. But don't worry - the rabbits will be taken care of just as much as usual! 

See you guys (on this blog anyway), in a couple weeks.

Made probably the biggest mistake today since starting HHR. I feel so bad! I counted literally MONTHS ago to the date of when Wicket, Butterfly and Zuzu would be 6 months old. Guess what? I miscounted, and I didn't double check! So today my threesome got carrot tops a month early, and they will be fine since it wasn't very much, but I will probably give them probiotics tomorrow as well just to be on the safe side. Better to be safe than sorry! I'm so glad my friend Jodie (she owns Razzleberry, Butterfly's full sister), caught the mistake, or else I probably wouldn't have double checked. And Zuzu and Wicket would have been bred a month early. I would've entered Butterfly and Wicket as seniors at their next show in October, even though they will still be juniors. 

Oh goodness. I've learned a big lesson today, and I hope you did too! Always double check! 


This mistake was simple to catch, but could've caused a BIG problem. Thanks Jodie!

Now I need to go apologize to Zuzu, Wicket and Butterfly for teasing them with veggies, when they can't have them for another month still....sorry.....! 

Before you can truly understand what a peanut is, you need to understand more about the dwarf gene.

Holland Lops are a dwarf breed. However, not every Holland has the dwarf gene. Lance doesn't have the dwarf gene. This is why he is so big (he's over 5lbs!). MOST Hollands have one dwarf gene.

If you breed a Holland to another and they both have one dwarf gene, most of the babies will have one dwarf gene. Some will have no dwarf gene. And some will have two copies of the dwarf gene, and be a peanut.

A peanut is a kit with the double dwarf gene. It cannot grow. Peanuts will always die within a few days. Some peanuts can live to grow fur, and, extremely rarely, open their eyes. But they will always die. And while their siblings double their birth weight in just a first three or four days, the peanut will not grow, and will not thrive. They might even get smaller. 

How can you tell a peanut from a normal kit?

Peanuts are extremely small. Even at birth they are almost half the size of their normal siblings. They are very skinny, and have an almost "peanut" shape, with bulging nose and eyes, and bottom. Their ears are characteristically small compared to the rest of their body. In most kits, as you can see in the photos above, their ears are small but they are relative to their body size. Peanut ears are less than 1/4 the size of a normal kit's ears. 

What are the chances of getting a peanut?

In a litter where the sire (father) and dam (mother) of the babies are both false dwarfs, you will get 100% false dwarfs. 
If a true dwarf and false dwarf have kits, each kit will have a 50% chance of being a false dwarf, or a 50% chance of being a true dwarf. This does not mean that you will get half trues and half falses, this means that you could potentially get all true or all false or uneven numbers of both, or half of each. This is like there being four marbles in a bag, and drawing a marble to determine false/true, and then putting it back and drawing again. You never know what you're going to get!

If a true dwarf and a true dwarf have kits, their babies will have a 50% chance of being true dwarf, a 25% chance of being false dwarf, and a 25% chance of being a peanut. Theoretically, you could have a whole litter of peanuts. Or you could have a litter without peanuts. Most likely, you will have some normal/healthy kits, and peanuts. Read the paragraph above to see what it means that each kit has a chance at being false/true/peanut.

Peanut vs. Runt:

Peanuts will always die very soon. It's in their genetic makeup, sadly. Some people swear their "peanut" lived to be an adult and is just a small bunny (2lbs or less). However, that was not a peanut. It was a runt. Runts happen sometimes. The baby did not enough room in the womb to get bigger, or didn't get as much milk when it was a baby. Or maybe it's genetically small. But it's not a peanut. Even runts and peanuts look very different. Peanuts have a very distinct look.

Sadly, peanuts are a part of raising a dwarf breed. They are unavoidable if you are trying to raise and breed show rabbits. But since this was kind of a sad article, I will end with a cute picture of normal one-day-old babies.

Rosie was due yesterday, September 6th. I stayed up until 11:00 PM waiting for her to deliver, and since she didn't look like she was going to within the next couple hours, I went to bed and set my alarm to 3:00 so I could check on her.d
At 3:00 I saw she was pulling fur! Yay, babies soon! I went back inside and dozed until 3:50. 
When I came back out to check on her, I saw that she had delivered!.....on the wire. All 6 babies, placentas, etc, were scattered throughout the cage. Since they had just been born, they were still warm, so I picked them each up and put them into their nest. 

I don't know what happened with Rosie's labor and delivery, she might've been spooked, or they were coming faster than she realized and she didn't have "time" to hit the box. Whatever it might've been, I'm so glad I got to them in time. They would've all died within a couple hours if I hadn't gone out there. A perfectly healthy litter of 6 would have froze to death.

This morning when I went to check on them, I noticed they all had full bellies (except the peanuts, but more on that later), and they are doing well! 

Sadly, two of the 6 are peanuts (I will be doing a post on that later), but we do have 4 healthy wiggle worms that I'm so thankful for. There are no pictures of the peanuts here. I will do comparison photos in the later blog.

I don't know colors yet. I do know that we have two brokens, and possibly two solids. Most likely they are all agouti something, but one of them is really light, so I'm wondering if it might be a tort. We do not have any chestnuts or broken chestnuts. We do have a possible opal/blue/chinchilla/squirrel I think!

I am going to post a lot of updates on these guys in the next couple months here on the blog and on my Youtube channel! I have a lot of informative videos planned that I've been needing kits for.

Of course, as always, my Facebook page will be updated very frequently! Maybe not daily like I want now that school is starting (I'm going to community college this year), but as often as I can.

I just wanted to do a quick personality evaluation of each of my rabbits, to see how each one is different and unique. And show you too, my reader, that no rabbit is the same, and each one has their own "special" quirks! ;)

LANCE: Lance is a big teddy bear. But he's crazy. Like psycho. He has the most energy out of every rabbit in my herd. He goes from 0 (sleeping) to 10 (jumping, running, craziness)  in like 0.9 seconds. Of course that's an exaggeration. But that's still what he's like. He's also very loving and wants to be held all the time.

SAIGE: Saige is a funny one. She's very obsessive and playful, she'll scratch and dig in a corner of her cage for HOURS and play with the same toy for HOURS just because she's bored. She scratches her pellets out of her dish or bites on her cage wire when she wants treats (which is ALL the time, by the way). 

ROSIE: Rosie is a sweetheart. However she can be territorial and sometimes mean if she wants to be bred, or if she's pregnant. Rosie is my loudest rabbit. Whenever she's grumpy she lets you know with a grunt.

TY: Ty is sweet. He's not very active in his cage. He's laid back and a really good boy.

BUTTERFLY: Butterfly is a sweetie but she definitely has spunk. She doesn't like to pose...only when she feels like it (she does it so well though!). She loves to chew on the carpet I'm posing her on and check everything out. Butterfly is curious, and she's super outgoing and is always at the front of the cage begging for attention. When she was younger she had super bad table manners at shows, but has getting much, much better!

ZUZU: Zuzu is shy, and scared of almost everything. I attribute this to her missing ear. She still loves to be held and snuggled though, she feels safe there.

WICKET: Wicket is a super tiny buck! Even though he's young he just wants to breed all the time. He's been a pain to pose these past couple weeks because of it. Oh well. He's still a sweet dude and loves to be held.

JET: Jet is a little shy, he doesn't like being picked up in his cage. He always runs away. But once you get him, he loves being held and snuggled. He falls asleep in my lap and loves little kids.

Maybe this is just because I spend a lot of time with my rabbits. I play with them, spend him with them and love on them. I take the time out of my day to get to know my rabbits. Because I love it. Especially with the rabbits that were born here. I got to see their little personalities develop, and boy did they.