Patience

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.