One Goodbye and Two Hellos

At last I feel ready to write about this. As some of you know, I had 2 two lovely bunnies. Well, Gidget died about 5 weeks ago of a massive tumor in her lower abdomen. We had little warning, but she stopped eating one afternoon and the next day she was gone. It was a complete shock to me and I cried for days, but Willie Rabbit seems to have taken it in stride. It's almost like he knew about it before I did. Well, he actually probably did come to think of it.

A few weeks ago he started tearing apart his cage, a sure sign of restlessness. He also started to paw and nip at me, which is also a way to show his discontent. So we decided that it was time to take him to the St. Louis House Rabbit Society to find a new "special friend". He met 7 new prospective bunnies on Saturday and seemed to hit it off with 3 of them. So we took him back on Sunday and he completely rejected one of the girls right off the bat. That left us with a set of bonded sisters who he seemed to not mind so much. There was a lot of mounting and flirting going on, so we brought them home.

On the paperwork their names are Opal and Pheobe and they are both large New Zealand Whites. They weigh in around 15 pounds a piece and dwarf Willie who is only around 5 pounds, but he seems to love large women. Gidget was twice his size. He has good taste as his bunny slave (me) is also a woman of substance. My hubby has always wanted to name our next bunny Eddie so we would have an Eddie Rabbit like the country singer.
When he heard our new buns were both girls he decided to name one of them Edwina and to call her Ed for short. I named the other girl Cecilia who will probably end up being called Cici, although she might get stuck with Bitey if she keeps on insisting on taking chunks out of my arms.

We have had several bonding sessions between Willie and the girls over the past week and things seem to be going well. The last two were half hour car rides in a plastic laundry basket. They all hunkered down a cuddled together, which was amazing because 2 times ago CiCi took a huge bite out of Willie's butt. This time all they fought about was who was going to do the grooming. They even still behaved after we got home and put them on our bed top. We will keep trying and I'm sure that soon they will be able to live together unsupervised.