I'm getting ready for my weekend out. I can't remember the last time I was out for more than a few hours without kids. They're with me, at least one or two of them, almost all the time. A whole weekend without kids is going to feel so foreign. I'm actually a little anxious.
A weekend relying entirely on the kids and my husband to do all the chores and animal tasks... Oh boy. I'll have to write up some instructions.
While feeding the colony today I found two dead baby bunnies. Not tiny new ones either, but the cute one we found a couple days ago and another one about the same size. I'm so frustrated. I've asked the kids to come up with caging options over the weekend. I have spare bird cage parts and we have a couple cages that need some modifications or repairs to be functional. They could use the bird cage parts to patch some of the broken cages. I don't know - but I want to remove all three of the does from the colony that weren't supposed to be there (that I tried to sell all winter long). I suspect one of them may be to blame since we didn't have this problem last year. I'll be crushed if this is the work of the new buck. I need to figure it out because I'm sick of finding dead bunnies where I should have a thriving family group.
Rather than putting the three does on hold until I can get them separated, I'm offering them for sale "as is." They're missing fur where they've pulled for nesting, and possibly from squabbles. They may be bred, they may be leaving behind litters, I don't know, but they need to go.
I've also decided to keep Rhona for breeding and potentially sell Fabio and Snowflake. I may have more I'm willing to part with (Fern, Lady Mo, Thatcher, and maybe even Gretchen or Lilith), but I'm not quite ready to put their names on the sale page. These are rabbits I've loved, several I've raised here and loved their parents before them. It's rough to let them go, especially not knowing how they;ll be treated by someone who doesn't have that connection to them.
I'm going to have to set out the eggs that need to go into the incubator on Sunday, and write out which rabbits are breeding to which (also on Sunday). My blog posts (if I have a chance to write blog posts this weekend) may be short. Not much to update about the homestead when I'm away from it.