Spring has sprung

Here in Northern California along the Delta, spring has definately arrived! Spring has always been one of our favorite times of the year. As for many, favorites include the flowers blooming or the rain showers, but I could guarantee any rabbit raisers answer would be, "Baby bunnies!" The mixture of excitement comes from breeding our does for Convention, our does nest building, the telling of the colors of our babies, and baby bunnies hopping out of nest boxes. The joy, love, and again excitement is a wonderful feeling.

Here in my rabbitry kits are falling out of boxes, showing pretty colors, and have attention wanting personalities. Head scratchings are musts for moms, for taking good care of their children who now try and nurse whenever they feel like it. For those not on litters, wire fills with colorful fluff and those with "beautiful coats" are beautiful until you touch, patches come off and I realize I don't have anything to really show at our spring shows.

But at least the babies are cute... here are a few pictures.



Thanks for the post from our guest blogger, Susie.

Happy Easter!

Look at the Easter basket I found in my yard! I have always loved Easter. We have never slighted the religious meaning of the holiday, but we also have a wonderful time celebrating in the secular tradition too. Even before we were showing rabbits, bunnies were popular at our house. I would gather all the stuffed bunny toys and put them in a path that led to the Easter baskets, so when Adam and Kendall woke up on Easter morning they followed the "bunny trail" to baskets of goodies. After Easter services, we had several other families come over for a great Easter meal--ham and all the spring specialties like strawberries and asparagus. Yum!

The highlight of the day was hunting eggs in our backyard. The moms stuffed the eggs with candy, small toys, coins, and even educational puzzles (which, as you would probably guess, were much less popular than candy and coins). Then the dads had the job of hiding hundreds of eggs in our backyard, well enough that the kids were challenged but out of the reach of the dogs (who also rejected the educational puzzles). At the sound of the bell, the kids took off running all over the yard searching for colored plastic eggs. The dads always followed up with a "sweep" of the yard to find just a few remaining eggs. No matter how long they looked, about three months later one of our dogs always showed up chewing on a plastic egg, in the hopes of finding a jelly bean. ("yuck!" says Nero "its another educational puzzled").

Hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Remember spring is here!

Carol

Have wool, will travel

Chris Schell, Ginger Mendat and Heleln Moore were on the fast track to Dalton, Ga. last weekend, traveling from district 9 to district 6. With Jersey Wooly Nationals on Sunday, we had quite a crowd of breeders on Saturday. This made five weekends of rabbit shows in a row for Chris, an all time record!

1 - Winning youth fuzzy with Chris Fry, standing in for his sister Jamie.
2 - Mary Wright (new breeder from FL), Sandi, Helen, Robin Fry (Mi) & Chris Schell
3 - Sandi Meadows (Fla.) & Kay & Bruce Heard (Al.)
4 - Kim & Tim Ringenbach (Al.)
5 - Keat Hor (Ky.) holding a winner!
6 - Show A with judge Randy Cler, BOB Mendat/Moore BOS Keat Hor
7 - Show B with judge Eric Stewart, BOB Mendat/Moore BOS Mendat/Moore

Ray Hall judged Show C, BOB & BOS - Mendat/Moore

I'm back!

Before I get to the meat of this post, sorry for my long absence. I feel like I have been on an airplane constantly for the past few weeks. Wait a minute, I think I have been! Anway I am home briefly and am taking this opportunity to post to the blog. If you sent photos and other information to me in the last 2-3 weeks be patient, I will catch up, promise.

So first, I spent the weekend of Feb 23 in Utah. It was fabulous. I judged at a show in Farmington, UT, met lots of great folks and saw wonderful Fuzzy Lops. Congratulations to Nate B and Lou T for breeding a beautiful black jr doe, who took Best in Show.

Hey I saw a little snow too!

Carol