Not Just For Christmas

At Christmas, it's easy to see an explosion of animals bred for the holiday season. These are often victims of impulse purchase, sourced from puppy mills and irresponsible breeders and neglected or dumped in the following year. They contribute to the tens of thousands of animals euthanized each year.

While many are aware of the horrors of puppy mills, bunnies are vulnerable as they are falsely seen as cheap, cuddly, low maintenance 'starter' pet for children. The reality is a bit different:
Bunnies Are Not Cheap
While initial purchase price may seem cheap the associated costs over the rabbits lifetime can be expensive. All rabbits should be desexed by a rabbit specialist, vaccinated and microchipped and these costs factored into the choice to bring a rabbit into your life. Young rabbits mature quickly and you can run into unwanted litters, hormonal and territorial behaviour, alarming rates of uterine cancer and poor litter box habits. Adopting a bunny from a shelter or rescue may mean this is $50-80, whereas private desexing/vax/microchipping may range upwards of $250 for vaccinations, check-up, spay, bloodwork, fluids, monitoring, pre and post op pain management, microchip etc. They will require vaccination annually and may require specialized and potentially expensive treatment for dental issues and GI stasis in their lifetimes.
Bunnies Are Not "Cuddly"
Bunnies are prey animals by nature and physically delicate. The exuberance, desire to pick up, grab, carry around and cuddle with whatever grip their little hands can manage are frightening and dangerous for rabbits. It often results in broken legs or backs or bunnies who learn to bite or kick when picked up after having been accidentally mishandled. Bunnies do enjoy attention and affection but a child's idea of having fun and enjoyment is not generally compatible with how prey animals like rabbits express and understand affection.

Bunnies Are Not "Starter" Pets
The reality is that rabbits are active, highly social animals who require a commitment of 10-12 years. They represent a significant commitment in terms of time, money and owner dedication. Being highly social animals, rabbits ideally should live in pairs as well.

Bunnies Are Not Low Maintenance
Most 'hutches' sold for rabbit housing are woefully inadequate. We would not imagine locking a cat or dog in a cage barely 3 times it's body length and on wire for the duration of it's life but this is what most bunnies are expected to consider home. Wire bottoms can lead to painful pressure sores, broken toes, injured legs/feet etc. The small sizes lead to poor long term health due to lack of muscle tone, loss of bone, obesity, poor cardiovascular health, poor gut health etc as well as the mental cruelty of such confinement and isolation. Outdoor animals are more at risk of disease, mites, fleas, predation, temperature extremes and owners not noticing illness. Bunnies hide illness very well and it is hard to notice subtle changes in an animal who is out of sight most of the day. Any outdoor housing or exercise yards must be completely mosquito proof to prevent exposure to calcivirus and myxo which have fatality rates of 100%. Instead a more ideal home is a bunny condo when it must be penned and access to rabbit proofed rooms in your home so it can be part of the family just as your dog or cat would.

Rabbits also require a fair amount of care - daily fresh food (good quality hay, water, fresh vegetables/herbs and a small amount of high quality pellets), litter changes, mental stimulation and at least 3 hours exercise time in order to maintain health and well being. Short haired breeds should be brushed regularly to prevent the ingestion of excess hair causing blockages or stasis, while long haired bunnies may require daily brushing. All rabbits require nail trimming.

For homes who are definitely keen on rabbits as pets, there are many more rewards but we need more awareness of the reality of owning rabbits responsibly. For those considering rabbits please check out The House Rabbit Society (www.rabbit.org), Australian Companion Rabbit Society (http://www.rabbit.org.au) for more information, Australian based Boing Online (http://www.boingonline.com). For more information on rabbit body language and behaviour The Language of Lagomorphs (http://language.rabbitspeak.com), as well as all sorts of information on Rabbit Links (http://homepage.mac.com/mattocks/morfz/rabrefs.html) and if you're in Melbourne the Melbourne Rabbit Clinic (http://www.melbournerabbitclinic.com) is one of the best bunny vets around!

Christmas Day

A few pics of the day... La did pretty well - we'd planned to get him two larger presents and limit the smaller ones and did pretty well. His biggest present was a swing set (swing, glide swing, trapeze/rings) and slide as he's forever requesting to go to the playground for those things. The other big ticket item was a wood stove/oven with utensils and 'food' so he can pretend to be a chef like dad. He also got a "build it and paint it" jet plane, a wooden chainsaw (so he can pretend to be a "Jamie" like his favorite arborist), a Wiggles dvd, a felt fishing set (pics of this tomorrow) and make-believe scene cloths (cloths with a lake, meadow etc to drive toy cars across) and a few more of the schleich animal figures. After we carried him out to the kitchen to make breakfast, we asked him to go see if Night garden was on telly to get him into the living room...

Here's the whole thing as he's discovering it in the morning. *g*

We're enchanted with the cooking set. It has a CLOCK folks - a CLOCK, with hands that turn even! Knobs to 'turn on' the burners, various cooking utensils (spatula, pizza cutter, ladle, wood spoon), a fry pan and pot, pot-holder and various foods (pizza and toppings on a bake tray, eggs, bacon, tomatoes etc you can 'chop' up and put in the oven.

This pic is a two-fer-one shot... the new Tonka truck, actually a dump truck, apparently doubles as a horse float for the little schleich horse. (Fresian I think...)

The chainsaw as it's slipped from the wrapping. We looovveee our chainsaw, much of the afternoon while we were assembling the swing/slide set was spent "trimming" and "chopping" the trees. ;-)

Finally the swing set is finished setting up! La is rather chuffed with it as you might be able to guess!

"Yeee-hawwww!!!" (I kid you not - courtesy of the Western Wiggles DVD...)

And best of all - the slide... swings are top notch but slides are a whole 'nother level of coolness in La-dom! *g*

Christmas

Lots of photos, it's been a weirdly busy-and-at-the-same-time slow past few days. ;-)

After several attempts this is the best photo of all dogs and child. I'll give you three guesses WHICH one wasn't holding the sit-stay and couldn't resist making the girls sniff for bikkies. First two don't count!

One of the little red poppet, clean and dry and NOT covered in water and mud for a change. (She is OBSESSED with digging in the little pool and dam!)

Decorating the christmas tree at home

Cheeky little beggar... he's grabbed one of the little gold musical instrument decorations from the tree and is pretending to play it, complete with hummed not-quite-in-key song tune.

The tree, stockings and such. The gold wire tree on the mantle holds our special breakable baubles, we choose a new one together each year to add to the collection.

Random La photo (Hey look at that! He CAN hold still! Photographic proof folks!)

I asked him to do nice photos for Christmas. "But mum, I want to RUN!"

Pensive critter. While he's mister smiley a lot of the time, we're definitely in THAT stage of things where he's old enough to know what he wants to do, not old enough to do it all and immensely frusterated with that fact.

After he'd been curious about the Santas in the shops for weeks we took him to Melbourne's city square to meet one there. Following in last years footsteps (where he pitched a tanty over having his merry attempts to catch pigeons interrupted to see Santa) he wasn't really clued into Santa's cued speech of 'what do you want for christmas'! We don't really do the "Santa is a magic person who flies around with reindeer and gives you stuff you want if you're good" thing so much as the tale of the original St Nicolas and that the Santa's now represent a visible wish to continue the spirit of using our bounty to help others, the needy and share our love with family/friends.

Poor Santa... really not what the guy was expecting, though we did get some high fives in.

He loved the big green tree... it was TALL and has BUTTONS you press to make NOISES...

One of him with Nic

And with me

Before turning into a ratbag, flipping upside down to watch the pigeons and carriage horses.

Why is this black and white? Artistic liscence? Nah... it just looks nicer when you can't see how muddy the bathwater is after "helping" garden all day!

Chrissy Pics

Wow... anyone else tuckered out from the Christmas experience? Me too! LOL

I also had too many foods with salt in them and spent the following two days feeling it. Blech! Stupid salty stuff has to taste so delicious! ;-p

Anyways, we had a pretty quiet Christmas all up. A few visits with our friends but a lot of people away on holidays this year so hopefully we'll catch up with the rest in the next little while. Despite it being quiet, it was a nice one... 'twas a beautiful sunny day for one which everyone enjoyed after being flooded the previous days! I even stayed more or less offline. *shock* La enjoyed all his prezzies, though we're planning to get the swing later because the fence needs to be installed first and the silly fencer was off for 5 weeks with a broken leg and then took holidays, so that'll start being put in Jan 8th.

At first we were a *bit* confused and completely ignored the prezzies in favor of the much more interesting ornaments. "Mum WOW, a TRAIN!!!"

Despite attempts to interest him in the presents it took a good 40 minutes to convince him to quit playing with the ornaments and balloons and see what those wrapped things were! LOL

The Christmas crackers were also quite popular... lol He popped I don't know how many of them!

Among the gifts were the ever popular playdough, note that we cleverly put the green one at the BOTTOM instead of the top or he'd have just halted all prezzie opening in favor of the green playdough. We're still praising ourselves on that one... ;-)

"Da geen!"

Once we managed to pry that out of his hands, other winners included this Charlie and Lola DVD. (Gee... you don't think he likes the series or anything do you?)

And by the end we'd really gotten the hang of this whole gift unwrapping business...

And were promptly finished for another half hour playing with the new wooden train. (So cute, it's got his name painted on each of the carriages!)

This is a bit later on playing with one of the features of the new DVD - a game of "snap". He smacks the screen whenever it's a snap match and Nic presses the button for him! Aw. Cute!

HAPPY HOWLIDAYS... the girls also enjoyed Chrissy and got some new balls (gods know how many tennis balls we go through) and heaps of treats and goodies to stock them through to next Christmas I think. So of course after getting them all clean, we took them out to the fields where they promptly rolled in sheep dookie. *sigh* Well, at least they were mostly clean for pictures!

I may try again later for better pics of them as they were a bit bothered by our new neighbors running their 4 wheelers all over the fields.

I did manage to snap this one which cracks me up! The girls look like they've had a little TOO much holiday cheer if you know what I mean! LOLOL Veri decided to go chase the ducks around the dam, so I got Hope and Si to pose for these below...

You can see Hope's fur is mostly grown back on her leg from where she snagged herself on the barbed wire, just a little pink spot of scarring.

And Sierra always manages to look rather doofy, even when she's trying to be serious. She's just a big pup at heart really and I think she always will be!

So those are our Chrissy photos... now that you've seen them, all you non-updatey people need to go update YOUR blogs! You know who you are... seeing as how some of you are a good 3-4 weeks out of date and I know you've got pictures to share! ;-p

Reflection and Further Lala Pictures

Somewhere when I was reading about gait (because the only time I'm not reading about dogs is when I'm reading about chooks...) I read that running is essentially nothing but a perpetually suspended fall - that is, we're in the motion of falling but the forward movement essentially keeps us upright. I think that really sums up this year for me... it went by so fast and with so many different things and quite frankly I'm amazed that I just kept running through it instead of splatting onto the ground in a spectacular fashion.

• The stress of selling, looking, several houses falling through, being in transit and officially without an address for a month, pulling this house out of thin air and less than 24 hours later signing the papers, setting it up, attempting to fix things.
  
• With the dogs there was trying to learn about showing, endless worrying about Hope's front and if she will or won't turn out as a show-dog and the future plans for either outcome, delight at how clever she is as I know she'll be awesome at sports, wanting to get her into classes (new years resolution: I WILL, I WILL, I WILL get her in!!!), Verity's arrival and she is just the brightest little joy I don't know what I'd do without her and an offer to "borrow" some other dogs to show as well in the future which is very nice.
  
• The chooks which are just brilliant fun. It's shocking how much I'm taken with the whole thing... I've had chooks before but they were just generic chooks and without knowing anyone also into them. I've met so many wonderful new friends through them and have so much fun working out all the genetics "stuff" involved! *huggles everyone* The damn fox taking Blossom, Petal and Basil.
  
• Sheep come/born/taken away/offer for more on the horizon.
  
• And of course... Laurent, who would merit a small novel to illustrate the challenges, joys and overall growth!
  

It feels like an endless ride of plans made, changed, fallen through and achieved - though rarely in the format I intended to. Sometimes I wonder if making plans at this point isn't a bit like trying to map out a path from the inside of a hurricane... it might make me feel better but cannot be expected to be straightforward! I'm not entirely sure if not being straightforward is delightfully fun or dreadfully annoying though. Sometimes I also think maybe I ought to try to make life proceed a liiiiiidddddllleee bit closer to plan but then again half the fun is in the spontaneity of finding out what comes up unplanned. ;-p

In the midst of all this we'd planned to start TTC #2 in January or March. (Now looking more like March.) I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of being a mum to two and the concept of having a toddler AND a baby. I also fervently wish you could have babies without the awful necessity of being pregnant for 9 months.

On days like today when Laurent is demonstrating the "terrible" two's I wonder how the heck I am going to deal with his moments of toddlerness while pregnant and later with a newborn. Or heavens forbid... two tornado toddlers if the second is like him. (Dear heavens... that's a terrifying thought!!!) Nic and I looked at each-other in the middle of an hour long tantrum today and sighed, "How do you feel about another puppy instead of a second child?" ;-p

On to the pictures from today! After last weekends not-so-great trip to the city Nic wanted to go for a second try today. I was not keen but I felt bad because I know he's a city-boy who hasn't done the city thing lately and he's gone to every dog show, trial, herding day and chook event I've asked him to without complaint. (<-- guiltguiltguilt) So after the long train ride - most of which was spent with a red-faced tantruming La (we made the mistake of saying, "No La, you can't push the buttons they've got for the handicapped to contact the driver") we had our coffee and I repeated last weeks sin and indulged in a chai latte and a red-bean bun. After Justin had to leave back to work, we took La for a walk and saw the big sparkly green tree...

Now you'd think being a BIG, very GREEN tree this would be up his alley. Nup. The only thing he was intested in was the pigeons. Mou. In the world according to La, the sole interesting thing in the City is the pigeons!

After chasing pigeons and watching them he also managed to ham it up for the Japanese tourists who were cooing over him and taking his photos which allowed me to get my own pics. (He is such a flirt!) The city had a very nice Santa with a not-too-long line and no gimmicky "if you won't buy a $50 photo package your kid can't see Santa" (and by implication, you don't love your child enough to give them this essential childhood right of passage you lousy cheapskate...) so I decided to push my luck. I had my doubts but y' know it was just such a tempting photo op and and Santa had lollies to tempt him (read: shamelessly bribe compliance with) so maybe he'd be okay today? Maybe? Possibly? (Okay, delusionally...)

Or not.~_~'

This was the closest we got to a nice photo. Poor Santa, he was such a nice guy but the lolly was promptly shoved back at him with a wailed, "Nooooo!" before Laurent resumed his tantrum and demands to be released, "wanna CHEEP CHEEPS!!!". He was NOT scared of Santa but BRASSED we'd stopped him from pigeon chasing to see ol' Santa. (Dear Santa, can I have a normal kid for Christmas??? One who is more interested in chocolate than chasing winged rats?)

After we slunk away from Santa with mumbled thanks and apologies, La went back to happy chappy after chasing the pigeons about trying to call them over to give kisses. I snapped this one and cracked up... he looks like a little pro flagging down a cab! LOL

To wear him out we took him down to the RBG for a romp and got this (much more typical, classic La) shot! Running around, pretending to be Hope and panting! (Check the tongue hanging out...)

Faking normalcy... a nice picture of him walking through the lavenders.

As all at playgroup know he is obsessed with vacuuming and pretends to vacuum everything constantly. Well here's the other half of that obsession - pretending to sweep. He spent a good 10 minutes sweeping the dirt with a palm frond. LOL

Finally some slightly more portraitish shots... La with his Dada.

And one Nic snapped of me with La without me knowing (omg I need a haircut!!!) watching the swans in the pond. Swans aren't quite as neat as ducks or chooks but they're at least as cool as pigeons and one of the few things that keeps him STILL for two seconds!

Now... *FLOMP*

artsy-fartsie stuff and Christmasy stuff

Okay, here's one of the sketches. I will add more later on as my photo editor is being impossible right now.

This is an older dog I saw a few years back at an ASCA show. He was laying near his owner, at once attentive and aware of her and his surroundings, looking like this sage old soul with his wise eyes and his muzzle grizzled with grey, calmly taking everything in and exuding an aura that struck me as the very essence of Australian Shepherd! I'd love to find out who he is and what his breeding is! I am posting it rather large so that some detail shows. Unfortunately unless I leave it full size some of the detail is already lost. I'm not totally satisfied , as the muzzle and jaw isn't quite right, looks rather weak compared to the real dog... and I'm not sure the backskull isn't too narrow either or the planes are off or something... I just can't decide! BUT considering I haven't sketched or even doodled in... um... well, the last drawing I have was in 2002, so 5-6 years, I'm happy with it as a first effort!

This was... well, "experimental". We went to a "paint your own ceramics" store so Laurent could paint daddy a mug for Xmas and I grabbed this little necklace to paint for myself. It's about life-size. I'm NOT a painter, just do sketches and drawings but what the heck! It was cheap fun! The ceramics paints are sooorrtaaa a cross between watercolours and tempra but more 'grainy' and dull till they're fired - rather weird! It was fun tho, even if it didn't come out how I imagined. :-p I'd love to do it again when I 1.) don't have an impatient toddler "helping" by grabbing the brush every 2 seconds, 2.) have a photo to work from and 3.) have my own fine-detail brushes. The smallest, finest brush they had was a #3 Round!!!!!! Buh! I needed a 20/0 fine tip! That's like using a sledge-hammer to tap in a penny-nail! Also would love to do proper painting classes first too! ;-P

Our wreath, which I made. It's a fakey pine thing with gold stick bits from Lyncraft and an tin-cut-out Aussie silhoutte that reads 'peace' which I got off e-bay ages ago for .25cents! :-)

Stockings, stocking weights on the fireplace with our little decorative deer. The stockigns and such were bought but I made the deer myself. Man does the fireplace and whole room look different since we've packed up the antique mantlepiece!

Our tree... which I didn't make a blessed thing for but am proud of anyway!

Our Christmas turtledove. The ledgend is that the little birds would watch over you and then magically come alive and whisper to Santa how you'd behaved. While I don't like the labels of "naughty" or "nice", I do like the ledgend and the little dove was so gorgeous I couldn't resist!

Of course, this is my greatest masterpiece... about 5 seconds before he covered that nice white shirt with mud!