Hope's Haven Mini Lops

Updates.

2010-11-14T21:00:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-07-08T12:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-07-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

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!!!

2010-02-03T20:57:00.001-08:00

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...

2010-02-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-31T17:45:00.000-08:00

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...

2010-01-23T21:42:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-01-18T20:33:00.000-08:00

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

Thats Unique.

2009-12-09T21:59:00.000-08:00

So most of the people that have passed through Bakersfield know the only thing that could kill a rabbit here is the Heat not the cold, but on Monday night it was raining so hard and the wind was blowing && there was a freeze warning we decided it was time to do something for the outside rabbits. My dad managed to put up plastic around the back patio to protect from the wind. Then he managed to run over to Home Depot to get a heater. We also stuffed their cages with straw.
THEN the next morning as the family was getting ready the Breaker broke because i guess it couldn't handle an extreme heater, 1 curling iron, 1 straightener and a blow dryer all going at the same time. So on tuesday night we just had to stuff their cages with straw again and hope that it didn't get to cold. The breaker still isn't fixed but now that the storm has passed he have got tell tomorrow night to fix it until the next storm comes in. It is the wind that makes it so cold for the rabbits so hopefully if we manage to keep the plastic on we should be fine. There aren't to many disadvantages to it being cold, our pointed white mini lop has managed to darken up! :) and now all our rabbits are getting lovely soft winter coats, but there was no way we could proceed with putting the rest of the rabbits outside until we put up a permanent patio covering that covers the whole patio to block the rabbits from the wind.
Well thats all :). Maybe it will actually snow this year? (Wishful thinking)

YAY!!

2009-11-23T17:03:00.000-08:00

Since i am a new breeder and i think this goes for all breeders you get a little nervous when you breed a doe for the first time. All my new does have had bad experiences in the past (babies on the wire/ one huge baby ect..) this was the first time i bred two new moms and i was super paranoid something would go wrong, but i woke up this morning and one of the new moms had her babies and while i was getting ready the other new mom had her babies. One Doe had 6 babies the other had 3. Then one of my old does had 6. In two of my litters there are possible ruby eyed whites which is very exciting for me! First time i have ever had ruby eyed whites and especially since i didn't expect it. Its so nice to get a unique color you didn't expect.

How is it possible?

2009-11-13T16:19:00.000-08:00

My dad went into the rabbitry this morning for a routine check up on how the rabbits were doing. he discovered that the 2nd place junior doe at convention had broken her back. she had started chewing her toes and my dad realized there was no hope. how does a rabbit break there back in there cage? she was a gorgeous doe and she will be greatly missed. I am wondering if there is anything i could do to prevent this from happening again.

Convention results!

2009-11-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

so we had 6 rabbits place in the top ten.
XG7 one of our solid senior bucks got 4th & 6G4 (BJD) took 6th
then we had BD8 (BSB) and 9SB0 (BSD) take 8th and THEN..
we had RR1 take 2nd and RR4 take 1st!! in the solid junior doe class!!!!!!

Preperation for convention.

2009-10-27T16:31:00.000-07:00

Getting ready for Convention isn't stressful until you realize you are in a royalty competition and you have not studied anything!! I need to at least study Breed ID seeing as i am on a team. (well im the alternate but still!) i still haven't tattooed or clipped nails. i have an awards night tonight and church tomorrow and some sort of appointment on thursday. Guess i have to squeeze it in somewhere. On top of that i have tons of school work. Other kids do it so i can do it to i guess! I bred 3 rabbits last week. 2 of them are first time mom's. bred them in time for someone to palpate them at convention because i still don't have the skill down very well. I am not sure if any of them took seeing as none of them doe and buck did not want to breed. i guess its because the weather is getting colder and we haven't had a lot of sun lately. We rearranged cages so that we could fit all of the new babies in real cages and not travel cages. So we threw the ones that aren't going to convention into the the cages that face the elements. Not very kind of us but its just temporary. We hope to sell at least 3 more of our rabbits at convention. Since we only presold 2. We made these gorgeous cage tags for convention and now we can't seem to find them. Guess thats the down side of making them 2 weeks before convention and not procrastinating.

Fun show.

2009-10-03T21:14:00.000-07:00

We went to Hanford today with my juniors! im told i am supposed to cut off showing a month before convention but they didnt seem to stressed so i guess it went well. I got Best Opposite Breed in one of the shows with my Chocolate Buck and that is his third leg!! My Broken Sable steel doe got her third & Forth leg but she is still a junior so i am super excited to see how she does at convention. she got a leg both shows! I brought 4 junior bucks from Posey's Mae and DeSurra's Gabriel's litter and one of them took first in his class out of 7 or 8 i think.. well anyways at only 3 months he got his first leg!! Michael Perez got Best of breed with his Jersey wooley and Best Opposite with his mini lop open for the first show and Best Of Breed that second show.
So all together it was a good and successful show!!

MY BABIES!!!

2009-09-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

so unfortunately i did not get a first place at the kern county fair. but the babies i sold to show at the fair did excellent!!! one got best of variety at 5 months old for the brokens then another one got best of variety and breed at 4 1/2 months old and then went on to win BEST IN SHOW!!! even though i dont own her any more i am super excited!! who knew i would have one of my own babies win best in show!! especially so young!! that owner was excited and a little shocked. this was her first show showing a rabbit. she had previously shown hogs but her FFA was cut at her school because of cut backs. it hadn't set in that she won best in show yet when i left the fair grounds. im so excited for her and that rabbit i am trying to convince her to let us bring her to convention. haha we will have to see!!

got the catalog!!

2009-09-05T18:59:00.000-07:00

I got the ARBA catalog and its awesome!! just thought i might share that with you.. Updated my website and it seems i have no clue what my babies colors are so if you could help me that would be nice. they are under bucks and does NOT litters since we have decided to keep them until convention.

It can be a little frustrating..

2009-07-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

So im new to breeding and figuring out colors of babies is really hard.
First i thought the five babies we had were two smoke pearls, two smoke pearl chins and one sable of some sort. and now it looks like our chins are not in fact smoke pearl at all hahaha. They are chins but what color? one looks like a black chin (of course out of all these lovely colors we get a regular black chin) and the other may be a lilac chin but im not sure. Oh and it looks like they are all Bucks except for one of the smoke pearls which is good cuz thats what we begged for hahaha we have to many does but now we are overwhelmed with bucks since we are keeping this whole litter tell convention.

The camera broke!

2009-07-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

I was supposed to update our website when i got home from tahoe like two weeks ago. But while in Tahoe my mother dropped the camera and it broke! the only camera that works in this house now is my sisters, she will not let us use it. We have one that we borrowed from my aunt but even with the flash on for some odd reason its super dark in on the pics unless they are outside. Since it is like 112 degrees outside i would rather not be taking pictures out there. So i guess i have to wait tell we can get a new one. (We want a nikon, something that can capture the color of our bunnies better). Have any idea on what camera we should get?

Getting ready to leave.

2009-07-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

so while we are out of town a transporter will be dropping off two mini lops with one of my unlucky family members that have never held a rabbit to carry out to duty of putting stressed out rabbits in there cages. im super excited about them and i think they will do well at convention! i have completed the task of cleaning out all! the cages and now i am relaxing for a bit before i have to go pack. i have been procrastinating on packing. Our white does babies are looking healthy her attitude has changed a lot towards us she is a lot nicer and she seems to always check her box to make sure the babies are in there. She does not seem to like us taking the box out to check them but she seems to not stress to much and still feeds them. I got blonde and red high lights. the blonde is VERY noticable but it will be ok. It is pretty hot here but the bunnies aren't too hot.

Suprise!

2009-07-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

So our grand champion white doe had her babies yesterday yay!! we thought she only had four but this morning when we checked again there was five. They are super light blue!! Not dark enough to be a blue chin. We have our theory's of what they might be but because we are not experts we will not know tell later. We decided to theme name this litter hahaha first time we have done this because we usually sale all our litters and let the owners name them. We are going with high class items as names like... champaign or first class or even gold standard. Tiffany as in the jewlry store is also another name we might choose depending on the sex of the babies. Does not look like they are brokens so our white doe is truly a solid!

its July 1st!

2009-07-01T14:45:00.000-07:00

It is really hot outside and my grand champion white doe is pulling fur! we have decided to keep all her babies because we only expect about 4 babies and we are counting on them being excellent! we are hoping for a solid buck and a broken buck! PLEASE!!! we procrastinated on breeding and our other older doe is not pregnant like we planned. It is to late now to breed her for convention but maybe we could breed for november and december shows. Our little chestnut babies are scared of there new feeder because it rocks back in forth and because of that they will not eat out of it. We put these feeders in because we are going out of town and need to make it as easy as we can for the person who is taking care of them. we even put all the bottles on one side. well got to go clean cages!!

First blog!

2009-06-30T21:08:00.000-07:00

I have seen a lot of rabbitrys with there own blog pretty much telling people whats going on. Crazy stories that have happend or just a bunch of randomness when they have nothing else to say. So i am planning on doing the same thing!! I have two does due tomorrow one i know is pregnant and the other has only created one litter for us and we have bred her four times while she was with us and i doubt she is pregnant because she is so small! We are going to tahoe this weekend and our last pair of rabbits from canada are coming while we are gone so i will not see them tell after tahoe. I'm excited!!! So this my first post probably will post one tomorrow too.