For many who get into this hobby, it is all too often, about the babies.  Understandably so, as I feel Holland Lop babies are not only some of the cutest of all rabbits, but of all animals on the planet!  I adore them.  They never become boring to me.  Perhaps because we have so few litters that we still find so much joy in them.  Studying them has become even more enjoyable than the babies.  It didn't take long for us to comprehend how much more there was to the hobby than just buying two nice rabbits and putting them together.  It is my opinion that I could buy 2 top notch rabbits and still only end up with average stuff.  One reason is this, I feel that even though you are buying nice stock from breeders you still need to have the smarts to know what to breed to what.  So even if you get a pair from a breeder, it doesn't mean that breeder would ever breed those two together.  I think it is so important to pick apart each rabbit and decide what you would like to accomplish out of a breeding,more so than just babies.  
We recently kept a doe who was not as typey as we would like.  I wrote a blog on her in the past.  We chose to keep her because of her very large crown, her very full hind quarters, her very heavy bone and her extra white sable coat.  It would be our first line breeding.  We knew we were taking a risk that we may end up with nothing but poor quality.  The babies are now only 4 weeks old and we still can't fully assess how they will turn out.  But so far we think we have one male that we like.  Much more growing to do before we will know for certain.  As far as babies go, this is the cutest one we have produced, which long term could mean nothing.  
The interesting part will be finding out how well this litter turns out.  Because a good many breeders would have gotten rid of this doe.  Too many breeders it seems, only keep what they think they can show and don't seem to focus on what they could use to improve their herd.  We like to find balance between the two and hopefully over time we will have something to show for it.

When we first brought Buddha home from the Ormonds we fell in love with.him.  I fel in love first with his sweet nature.  His ability to pose for hours.  If I put him on the posing table, he will truly remain posed and stay there for a solid hour if I were to leave him.  If I put him down inside he finds a comfy area and sits posed and does not move.  The more I photographed him and admired him, the more I fell in love with his adorable large round eyes.  For me they became the perfect eyes and I want all of our Hollands to have them.  After he sired a couple of litters I started to see more of those eyes, even if in small numbers I was elated.  And a new trait became so apparant.  He has a wonderful cute round head to go with those cute round eyes, and has done wonders to improve the curvature of skull in our rabbitry.  
This is one of the wonderful reasons to watch your lines and fine tune them to your liking.  You can read as much as you like on standard and when to cull for what reason.  Small feet, long ears, fine bone.  But it becomes an art to pick and choose your own personal favorite traits that years from now you hope your stock exhibits.  

Our babies are finally to the age where the happily bound in and out of their nestbox.  It is an adorable age and completely captivates me every time I walk past.  They are now familiar with my voice and bound over to the cage door for affection.  Our little sable litter is so pretty but are truly about half the size of our multi shaded litter.  Makes it hard to believe they were born on the same day!  So far Kait is in love with the light tort, whom she has named Finn.  The other two are does.  In our sable group we have two bucks and two does.  Quinne has been elated to finally have her own litter to work with.  Now for the long waiting game to begin. 

In the past we have let our first mix lop Ginger, roam free.  It was a fun experience for all of us, when it was just Ginger.  As we had more rabbits, we learned Ginger would get aggressive toward certain bucks and they would latch on to each others faces through the cage.  Didn't take but a second to realize this didn't work so well.  So if Ginger was free we had to continually supervise any other bucks we put out in the play pen.  It quickly lost it's joy.  Well just recently for the fun of it, I let 2 litter mate sisters go along with another doe.  In the course of just a couple hours they established territory.  One took over a small corner of the yard, one a nook by the swing set, and one nestled into the raspberry patch.  They would graze head to head in the yard without conflict.  However, if one were to venture too close to the others zone they would give chase.  It didn't take much and the others quickly understood their zones.  They have a common ground and their private area.  Very amusing how quickly they established this.  I so love waking up and pouring my coffee looking out my kitchen window and seeing the rabbits playing on the lawn.  It instantly brightens my day.  Letting them run free brings out this different personality in them.  Our black doe is usually not very friendly and I have not gotten very close with her.  She was truly one of the most boring rabbits, seemed void of personality.  When I set her free she was cautious at first then began to race about the yard.  She would run and binky so high in the air it made me laugh.  After a few days out running free she is so enjoyable.  She is the first rabbit that comes to greet me when I go out in the morning.  

Well for those of you who know me, I am probably never going to win any type of award for patience.  So why I chose to fall in love with a hobby and breed that requires extreme amounts of patience is beyond me.  With our first litter it was easy and fun.  As space grows limited and food bills increase, the patience thing becomes more difficult.  So while growing Juniors we know it is a long long process.  Once while discussing this with the Ormonds they said they feel safe making cuts usually by 4 months but often later.  This speaks volumes.  This is a couple who has been breeding Hollands for a good portion of their lives.  That judges them and knows the breed better than most in the world. So thinking you can make a cut at weaning age and be accurate is just careless.  That has been fine and dandy here.  We know they have to go through their uglies and we muddle through that phase as well.  But... sometimes it's still easy to jump the gun.  We recently had a litter of 3 that just starting to finish their molt from uglies.  To our dismay they were still looking ugly.  Well, one week later, I decided this batch wasn't going to work out for our show plans so I decided to take some pictures of them to list them for sale.  Well to my complete surprise, in the course of one exact week, one had blossomed!  So this brings me back to patience.  What if he hadn't blossomed until next week and I had already listed him.  Not that him having a home would be a bad thing, but a big part of us growing and feeding and caring for them is so that we can show them.  We would have thrown that chance away just for the lack of patience.  So of course now I can't wait to see if the others blossom as nice.  If not we are still very pleased with this cute 3 month old hunk.