“Get rabbits for your FFA project,” they said. “It’ll be easy,” they said.

Little did they know.

It all started a little more than a year ago when our daughter joined Junior FFA (Future Farmers of America). She thought this would be a great idea seeing that she doesn’t do sports and a lot of other activities.

Reminder before I go any further that we live in a suburb.

As part of the program, each student is asked to do a project. Most of the students choose some type of animal as their project. You have options for steer, pigs, goats, lambs, chickens, and rabbits. All of the animals except for rabbits require the students to go to the barn to take care of the animal. Usually in the morning and in the evening. Anyone who knows our daughter understands that getting her up in the morning before 7 AM is almost impossible. So the idea of going at 6 AM and 6 PM to the barn to take care of an animal was a nonstarter. So rabbits it is!

She decided last fall that she wanted rabbits but by the time we joined the group, the rabbits had already been ordered from the breeder so we had to wait until this year. Can I just say that our daughter is not the most patient so waiting almost an entire year has been painful for her (and for us hearing about it all the time).

The day finally came earlier this year when she had to decide between California rabbits and New Zealand rabbits. She didn’t like the “bloody red eyes” of the California rabbit so a New Zealand rabbit was chosen.

Then came the wait. While other students were getting their animals, she had to wait until after Thanksgiving. As the day drew closer to when we would actually pick up the rabbits, she could hardly contain her excitement.

Let me pause here and clarify that when I reference rabbits, I really mean rabbits. With an “s” at the end. We weren’t just getting one rabbit. We were getting four, yes 4, rabbits.

And a few other notes to set the context for us getting these rabbits. We had very little information because:

1. She is in Junior FFA and this is only her second year. With COVID, meetings the previous year were few and far between.
2. We knew one person that had rabbits the year before but didn’t even think to ask them questions. We thought we would get all the information from the teacher.
3. A couple of the teachers/leaders for FFA are new this year.
4. We live in a suburb (just had to state this one more time). It’s not like we could pop over to the next farm and ask them for advice.

I’m not going to write everything in my first post, but I’ll keep you updated on a regular basis of how this is going. As a preview I’ll let you know our first night with the rabbits was not good. We were totally unprepared as rabbit parents.

P.S. Many of you follow this blog because I generally post about faith and family. I will say that this season with rabbits is testing our faith. We’ll see how long we can keep the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) thriving in our home. Especially peace, patience and self-control.

P.S.S. Rabbit projects generally only lasts for 8-9 weeks until the County Show. Per our daughter, “we will have these rabbits for a lifetime” so readers…be prepared to hear more about rabbits than you ever wanted to know over the next several years! LOL!