Nest Boxes, Babies and Colors

Gracie is our little opal doe.  We bred her with Nacho (one of our grand champion bucks) last month.  She had 3 babies yesterday.  They are doing well - no peanuts.  We are so excited to have babies again after a few misses earlier this month.  Ash has a nest box and is pulling fur today.  We have nest boxes in with Amber, Pearl, Sabi, Dixie, Expo and Daisy also.  Even though Daisy gave birth to 3 babies early last week she may still have more babies.  Better safe than sorry. :>  We usually don't breed this many does at a time.  But the weather was so cool at the end of July and first of August that we took advantage of the opportunity.  It continues to be unusually cool.  The highs were in the 70s yesterday and today.  Is the world coming to an end??  It is actually cool in August.

This round of breeding is exciting for us.  Expo is one of the first babies from our new lines.  This will be her first litter.  I hope she has live babies.  She is a sweetheart.  But she has been really agitated for the last few weeks.  Hopefully, she isn't going through this process for nothing.  We bred Expo to RJ (Nacho's son).  They should have beautiful babies.  They are both compact Hollands with beautiful bodies. 

Gracie, Ash, Sabi and Pearl are our colored does.  We are really missing the colors in our barn.  We have been focusing so much on type that we have lost most of the color in our barn.  When we started in Hollands we didn't know about color.  Some of our first Hollands just happened to be colored.  So we have been used to seeing color in the barn.  With the change in lines most of our barn has been transformed to tort.  We are so thankful for the improvements in type.  But we like the excitement that comes with color.  We know that typey colored Hollands are possible.  We had those in our old lines and gave them up when we changed lines.  So if we can  keep the consistency with using the colored Hollands, we will continue to work with them.  Otherwise, we will just love our tort Hollands.  The excitement of seeing excellent tort babies still outweighs the excitement of an average colored Holland.