Updates.

Wow i have not posted a blog in a really long time! Two of my does are due this week and im really counting on their litters at this moment, I have so many people interested in babies! One of the litters due is DeSurra's Magic Temptation to Posey's Mae and VT's Panda(Pointed White) to Votaw's Audrey (daughter of Posey's mae(REW) and Hoppin's Java Chip) I am hoping to get some pointeds out of this breeding. When she was PC'd at 2 weeks only 1 baby was felt, im hoping there are more. Convention was AMAZING! My highest placing was 4th out of 21 with my Broken Junior Buck(Sire: Posey's Kole Dam: VT's Halo), I also got 5th with my Broken Senior Doe (Votaw's Chloe Sire: Hoppin's Java Chip Dam: Posey's Mae) and 5 other top ten placings. I got 6th in display points and 5th in sweepstakes.

Life.. And rabbits!

Just thought i would share some stuff. Right now we have an amazing chicken area! Though we only have three we have room for about 3 more! They love it out there especially because the water from the rabbits misters rolls down to there coop and it builds up in the corner which attracts a lot of bugs. I expect to get some more when school starts. Also I just got my permit and driving is a little frustrating at first. My mom is getting a new car because hers is beginning to be non-fixable. Which means i have to wait to start driving until after she picks out a new car. Don't want to break down on my second time driving! Depending on what she gets i might have to learn to drive in my sisters car (scary!) because if its very fancy and on the large side then my mom wants to me drive my sisters car so i can learn in a smaller car, But if she gets a sport car (like the one she test drove yesterday) then i can learn to drive in it! Also i have some lovely steels in my convention litters! but im also getting people from different states asking for my convention babies. I don't know who to get rid of i like them all! besides the ones im selling as pets. The only broken buck in Autumn and Gabriels litter is having really bad eye issues.. i have treated it with teramycin and go dry and i have given him just a dab of liquamycin in the mouth. He is in a lot of pain which makes him close his eyes and when he closes his eyes it makes his eye get matted again. Its a vicious cycle! and his mom and siblings keep licking his eye so when we got to wean today i will separate him from his siblings. Also there are rumors that my FFA might close down after fair! i have been desperately working towards my state degree and i would be very upset if that was real! a lot of schools in california are losing their FFA programs but i thought we had a lot of support at our school or at least enough to keep it open. Well thats all i have to say.

Have a fantastic week! Only one more week tell summer school is over for me!

Alison Votaw

Hopes Haven Mini Lops

The new BABIES

So my convention babies are looking fantastic! I have a variety of colors from, black chins, blue chins, blues, smoke pearls, Silver tipped Steels, and my favorite smoke pearl chins :).

Featured in this picture is my smoke pearl doe, Esther. She has a great head and her crown is actually pretty nice though you cant tell from this angle. She is for sure going to convention. My goal is to place once! thats a lot to ask especially for my second year of going to a convention but even if I don't place Mall of America will be worth it!!

Well I hope everyone is doing well and I hope your convention babies are showing promise! :)

Have a wonderful summer,

Sincerely, Alison Votaw

Hopes Haven Mini Lops

The New Additions

We got 3 Rhode island red hens (or at least we hope they are hens). They are only 3 weeks right now. They are so much easier to take care of than rabbits, but there poop is much messier and they tend to make a huge mess of their water and food dispensers. The names are Darla (after little rascals), Chubakah or chewy, and Apple Cinnamon but they call her Mac as in the lap top because her name is apple. It is a new experience for our family seeing as we only have rabbits, dogs and cats. I plan on showing them in the fair and my dad plans on using their eggs for breakfast to save money. The rabbits do not like when the flies come during summer but, the chickens seem to love them! we are planning on building a coop under our peach tree away from the dogs and potential dangers.

BABIES!!!

We bred VT's Halo and Hoppin's Java Chip and we got Two chocolates and 2 chocolate chins and 1 broken chocolate and 2 charlie blues possibly. One of the chocolate chins might be a chocolate chestnut. Either way they are sooooo cute!!!!

Not a good morning...

So two Doe's had perfect litters nothing went wrong. But our third one that wasn't due tell friday had 9 dead baby rabbits on the wire this morning. Big plump rabbits... We are trying to remember if we had bred her earlier or not but we don't think so. We put in a nesting box for one baby that seemed to be breathing but instead the mom took out all the fur out of the nesting box and tried to find her babies to give them fur. Or at least thats what it seemed like.

New Babies!/ Bakersfield Show

Friday VT's Halo had her first litter and there were 7. It was Out of a silver tipped steel and a broken chocolate. An unlikely couple. Hoping for opals since when the broken chocolate was bred to our gold tipped steel they had an opal. We would like some lynx in the future so an opal would be a wonderful addition to our rabbitry. We had another litter on Saturday but only 2 were in this litter from Posey's Mae(REW) and DeSurra's Caspian(broken chestnut). She has been having small litters lately. One is almost a black color but has a white stomach. It could be something as simple as a chestnut or a black chin, but seems to dark. It was a solid to a broken but both were solids.

The Bakersfield Show was a success!! We had a lot of judges and luckily we had a lot of exhibitors to fill up the judging tables. The Holland lop specialty attracted so many breeders! The raffle was HUGE and it took my mom and a bunch of volunteers to make it as organized as we can get it. My dad sold his Uncle Gimpy's meat rub and chili mix at the show and it seemed to get the word out. In the Future he will sign up to have a booth at other shows rather than Bakersfield. It took a lot of work to set up this show and it didn't help that many of us got a stress headache even before the show started. I have to thank Chris Zemny for the Advil it really helped! The show seem to run smoothly and there weren't a lot of complaints. People seem to like the Cash prizes so we are going to continue with that for future shows. So overall the show was EXCELLENT! and next year will be even better!

Fun story...

So we had a rabbit we recently put out side that is constantly thumping through the night and had gone off feed. We were worried and thought we should move her back inside since we did not know why she would make so much noise and why she had stopped eating. We had a put a towel over her cage but that didn't help much. We even replaced her water bottle with a crock and it didn't make a difference. So in the middle of the night my dad went out there to check on the rabbits and he had left the light on and she didn't thump again during the night and she had eaten when we checked in the morning. It seems that if we leave the back porch light on she does not thump and eats her food. We experimented a little bit doubting that the darkness was the cause but it seems to be. We have a rabbit that is scared of the dark. We had moved most of my rabbits outside in an attempt to get them settled before the hot summer. We managed to move everyone outside except for babies and mothers seeing as the weather is being unpredictable and we don't have an outside heater. We don't know if we should move this scared rabbit back inside or not but she is really ruining our plans to have no rabbits inside if she has to come back inside. Oh well maybe she will grow out of it when she gets older, since she is still a young rabbit.

The Storm!

So we have a storm coming in for the rest of the week and we got a peak of how bad its going to be today. The rain was fun to walk in but the street was flooding. The Wind got so bad that someone got killed by a tree falling on his house. The plastic tarp that was protecting our rabbits from the wind has ripped so we need to find a new thicker way to cover our rabbits before the rest of the storm comes in. The KCRBA shed blew away today 2 weeks before our show. Just hoping there wasn't any severe damage to any of our show stuff. We have no workable plugs in our back yard in order to keep the rabbits warm so we are finding some creative ways to keep them warm.

Hope everyone else is keeping warm. :)

- Alison Votaw