An abundance of baby kits

Well!  The blue doe totally took me by surprise.  Last week the white doe had her kits, (10 of them!  Five light, five dark.) but the blue doe still showed no signs of impending birth or even that she was pregnant.  I checked in on mama the next morning before work and then Jesse texted me later saying the blue doe had a bunch of fur in the box and the fur was moving!  I was so excited to get home from work that day!  She had six kits, one white and five dark.  I’m not sure if this was a smaller litter because she was a first-time mother, or if rex breeds have less kits, or…  Who knows.

I decided to be more hands-off this time around and that if any of the kits weren’t being fed, so be it.  I checked in on them morning and night and then a couple nights ago I noticed one severely thin kit in the white doe’s litter.  I debating just culling it but decided to take it inside and tried to feed it but it died that night.  The next day I noticed a very thin kit from the blue doe’s litter.  It wasn’t as bad off as the other one, but it died yesterday as well.  So that leaves nine in one litter and five in the other, still a respectable amount.  Even though they are only one day older, the white doe’s litter is HUGE compared to the blue doe litter.  I don’t know if the white doe has more milk or if her kits are just larger due to breed.

We are probably going to dispatch the remaining grow-out kits during Jesse’s spring break.  I figured we’re probably spending close to $80/month on feed and when I brought that up my one of my rabbit forums everyone chimed in and said that was way too much.  For the most part folks said we need to supplement more with alfalfa hay and other items.  Alfalfa is much cheaper than the pellet feed, so we’re going to have to look into that more.  We still haven’t determined if we will keep any of the females or if we want to just stick with the two.  I probably should be handling the grow-outs more if I want to keep one.

Jesse and I have been enjoying our fermented garlic so much that I recently started five more batches.  I need to remember to burp the jars soon otherwise I may end up with exploded glass and garlic in my cupboard.

I recently second fermented some kombucha using a pineapple-coconut juice.  I am not a fan of the results.  I originally bought the juice to use with a ginger bug but because I don’t currently have a ginger bug I decided the juice shouldn’t go to waste.  I am making my way through the kombucha but I’m really sad that it turned out poorly.

We’ve been enjoying some nice weather lately.  The temperature has been in the 50s so the snow is all melted and the air feels almost balmy.  I’ve been outside without my coat a couple times and it’s felt comfortable.  Jesse let Ezra run around without shoes on yesterday.  Ezra is going to want to live outside in the spring, I can tell.  I’m eagerly awaiting spring as well.  Summer, not so much because it can get blasted hot here, but I do like spring.

We’ve been talking about what we want in the garden this year and how we want to shape it.  One of the pear trees died, so that kind of opens up the floorplan.  Jesse says it looks like something ate the roots, so now we’re down to just the one pear tree.  Hopefully it’s either a self-pollinator or there is another pear tree in the neighborhood.  Our other trees are looking good, though.
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On a completely different topic, I like to read other homesteading blogs.  I get ideas and can dream about having a small farmstead, learn about canning, processing animals, etc.  Some of these bloggers are religious and occasionally that comes out, but typically it’s kept at a minimum so I don’t mind.  However, I *just* read a blog post by Rural Revolution and it quite irritated me to the point where I have deleted the blog from my favorites bookmarks.

The post was about Girl Scouts and their affiliation with Planned Parenthood, and the writer included an excerpt from someone and to my mind she completely took it out of context.  Then there were a bunch of comments afterward that were all “Praise God, hallelujah!”-style comments and to me they were very ignorant and ignorance just pisses me off.

I believe that you can have morals and teach your kids restraint and consequences but you can also know that not everyone is going to have the same morals and restraint.  Pointing a finger at Planned Parenthood and saying that the program encourages women to stray from a moral path is just bad math.

Planned Parenthood is not only about abortions, which is what everyone seems to focus on.  They are about education and providing services to women who need them.  I don’t think it’s the right mentality to say that if we took away Planned Parenthood and only taught our children abstinence and to keep their legs closed that our country would be so much better.  Again, that’s ignorance, willful ignorance.  Because it’s not going to happen.  People are going to fornicate.  That’s just the way it is.  It’s much better to provide education and the means to protect oneself than to just hope everything works out for the best.  This is not to suggest that we should just give up and not try to teach our children morality.

I know some Christians, good people, who seem to realize that they can have faith and their beliefs and still not point the righteous finger because they understand they can’t force everyone to think like they do.  They realize that there are options, that there *should* be options, and that people should have freedom of choice.

I don’t know, I’m kind of rambling here, but I will no longer be reading that particular blog, that’s for sure.


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