She's kindled!

One of our does finally kindled! We're so excited! We've been trying to breed her for months. It was such a delightful surprise to have it finally work! We counted five kits, all healthy and strong by all appearances. Rabbits have a high infant mortality rate, so I don't know how many we'll have left in a month, but we're delighted to at least have had a full term pregnancy. Sarah and Matthew were so excited to go outside a peep at the little babies. They've promised to tiptoe and whisper whenever they're near the "maternity ward".

I can't remember if I posted anything about the hutch...I don't think I did. Nathan designed a two-level rabbit hutch that's self-cleaning so we don't have to deal with cleaning out rabbit pans. We built it together in the evenings after work from the minute he came home until it was too dark to see. After that we'd finally eat dinner. :) It was so fun to work as a family on this project.

The wood we built it with was free as well. I found someone in our neighborhood replacing a wood fence, so we loaded the van with all the good pickets and posts and used those for the construction of the hutch. The children picked out the hutch door handles from the Habitat for Humanity Restore. They had so much fun digging through bins of cabinet handles looking for the best ones. Sarah's rabbit was the pregnant one, so she picked a handle with a blue heart so the rabbit family would have the prettiest apartment in the hutch.

The hutch works so well and I never notice any 'off' smells since the dropping all fall to the leaves underneath and start to compost right away. The rabbits seem quite content there. Nathan designed it so the enclosed 'apartments' are all together on the inside and only divided by chicken wire instead of wood. This way the rabbits can share body heat in the winter.