Bunny Stuff

Well, Polka unfortunately died yesterday.  However, like I had said there was the great news of Cupcake having six adorable babies!

My brother heard on the radio that we're going to get a cold snap tonight.  Apparently it's going to get below zero!

Consequently, I hooked up a heat lamp for the baby bunnies and the mother to help keep them warm tonight.  Especially poor Cupcake who's completely bald on her chest and front legs as she ripped the fur off for her babies to stay warm.

Then I went and cut up old feed bags and zip-tied them to the cages to help keep the wind from directly hitting the rabbits, in an attempt to help keep them a little warmer tonight.

It took me a good hour or so and it was freezing already!  If it does get that low, all my water bottles out there will freeze and I won't be able to use the hose anymore.

I'll have to water them the way I did last winter...get out a sled.

I had a sled I used last year which I'd throw the frozen water bottles into and drag down to our basement where I'd defrost them, fill them up with fresh water, and then drag them back up to the rabbitry and distribute the bottles to the rabbits.

It takes a LONG time and has to be done quite a few times a day when the weather gets really cold.

I also have to watch that my bottles don't crack.  If there's too much water in the bottle when it freezes, the ice expands and breaks the bottle.

This happened quite a few times last year and I really am hoping I'll be able to keep that from happening again this year.

I put Buttons and her babies out to graze for a while in the grass earlier today.  They enjoyed every minute of it!  Buttons' is a digger though, so I had to keep a close eye on her.  Sure enough, she started digging and did dig quite a bit. 

Oh! I almost forgot, but this morning after church we came home to see the wind had knocked down my top row of rabbit cages!

It took my older sister, mom and myself to get them back up properly and while that happened, Eleanor (an albino rabbit from the porch) had gotten out of her fallen cage somehow and was very frightened.

Needless to say, it took quite some time to catch her.  And it didn't help that the wind had blown open the chicken coop door, letting all the chickens out which we had to catch.  They were part of the problem in catching Eleanor.  She was scared of them.

And every time I went to catch her, the chickens would follow me to watch and freak her out, so she'd go running. 

Hopefully I'll be able to get some pictures of the babies for you soon.  Also, I cleaned in great detail the rabbitry today. 
I pulled the shriveled up mums out and did a BIG raking job! It looks so much better back there now.  I also cleaned out all the leaves that were stuck in the sink back there.

I know, I didn't have many pictures in this at all!  But I promise my next post will have lots of pictures for you all :)