Bringing Zen Home

[Pavan Outlaw]

Ababy rabbit will be pretty stressed out by going to a new home. Stress can affect their digestive system causing diarrhea. If diarrhea is left untreated it can lead to death. My recommendation is to make sure your bunny has access to Timothy Hay. Eating hay helps their digestive system stay in good shape.

Make sure to find out what kind of food they are used to eating from the seller. You should feed the same kind of food or transition slowly over the course of a week. Again, bunnies have sensitive tummies.

Find out if they are used to drinking out of a crock or a bottle. We prefer bottles because the water stays cleaner. However, we have had several rabbits that refuse to drink out of bottle and will only use a crock.

Once your bunny has settled in make sure you interact with it a lot! Rabbits are smart. Most rabbits are friendly unless they have a reason not to be. Also, interacting with them gives you the opportunity to observe their behavior. If your bunny is acting unusual it might mean it is sick or injured.

If they start to dig, scratch or get squirmy it is their way of letting you know they are done being held. Sometimes it can mean they need to pee! With a young rabbit we just put it back at this point and get it out for snuggles at a later time.

Our first version of a hidey hole was just a box with holes cut into two sides. Mr. Mustache would run in there and hide by putting his face in the corner. His little ears would stick out of the two holes on the sides of the corner. I wish I had a picture, it was the cutest thing. Now Mr. Mustache is always at the front of his cage begging for attention.

Hopefully by four months you have been enjoying your rabbit awhile. At four to six months rabbits hit their sexual maturity. This is a time when they start to act like teenagers. They can be very moody!

Well, I hope that gives you an idea of what to expect. Rabbits can make great pets! If handled correctly most of them become super friendly. Good luck and if you have any questions feel free to contact me.

I was putting a fresh diaper on 5-day-old George when I heard the front door bang open. "We're okay!" my husband, John, called from the living room. I scooped up the baby and ran to find John in the doorway cradling our 3-year-old, Levi. Both of them were covered in blood. A rag John held to Levi's forehead leaked red droplets onto our welcome mat.

"We're okay," John repeated, giving me a pull yourself together look. "Levi had a bit of a bike accident, and I'm taking him to the doctor." He grabbed his keys and the two of them were off. Shaking, I laid baby George in his bassinet, sat down and sobbed.

George entered the world like his brother: painful labor and an unplanned C-section. But that's where the similarities ended. With Levi, John and I spent the first four days in the hospital together while the three of us learned how to be a family. We ordered huge plates of room service, took naps, and spent hours holding and gazing at our beautiful new son. Photos document us proudly buckling him into his car seat for the ride home, posing with favorite nurses and bouquets of flowers.

This time, John spent one night in the hospital after George's birth, then left to take care of Levi, who'd been juggled between family and friends in the two days since my labor had begun. Instead of feeling the fullness of our family expanding, I felt it fracturing, breaking; George and I were in the hospital, while John and Levi were at home.

The night John brought Levi to the hospital to meet George, I was unsure of what to expect. Levi appeared in the doorway, holding an enormous vase of flowers he'd picked from our yard. He gave me the long hug I'd been craving, then climbed up on a chair and giddily peered into the plastic crib and said hello to his little brother for the first time. Then he climbed back into my bed and ate my entire tortellini dinner while snuggled in my lap.

When it was time to leave, though, he fell to the floor in great, heaving sobs. I'd never spent more than one night away from my son. This would be night three. I assured Levi that I would be home soon, but what I couldn't tell him was that everything would be back to normal. Because, of course, it wouldn't.

This was delusional. First, Levi isn't a big talker. He's still developing his language skills and is an introvert to boot. This made it exceedingly difficult to have an honest conversation about his feelings. Second, I was too tired and taxed by the demands of a newborn to be the amazing parent I wanted to be. In fact, in the brief time I'd been parenting two children I felt completely inept, like I wasn't qualified for the job. Levi's accident and resulting stitches felt like a confirmation of my incompetence. This sense that I was failing, coupled with fatigue and hormones, had me in tears every few hours.

Walker explains these feelings well. "When we're sleep deprived, our bandwidth is a lot shorter. Our resilience is a lot shorter," she said. "And with the second, there's a lot being asked of us. It puts us in this unrealistic predicament where more is being asked of us than we can give. It's hard to be graceful through this transition."

George's first weeks at home were far more difficult than I'd imagined they would be. My recovery was slow and painful and, at a time when Levi needed me more than ever, I was often unavailable. I would try to put him to bed only to be interrupted by a crying, hungry baby. Levi wanted to be carried, but my C-section incision needed to heal.

I wasn't alone in my underestimation of how much work the second would be. In talking with Richmond father Steve O'Malley, he shared that "When we brought home our second, I naively assumed that the jump-in workload would be minimal. I knew what I was doing with the first, so it should be just a little more laundry, a little more food, et cetera. Right? Wrong."

What many optimistic parents forget is that doing things for two children often takes twice as long, and cuts deeply into parents' already limited time for sleep and self-care. "Small children try to kill you through sleep deprivation," O'Malley joked. "Having two at the same time, we were in a constant state of fatigue. We were operating in survival mode. Housework, maintenance, exercise and grooming habits all suffered."

When John returned to work three weeks after George was born, my sister, Abby, flew out to help. At that point I was well aware that I was not parenting Levi the way he needed me to, and Abby, a seasoned nanny turned family psychologist, didn't pretend otherwise. It was hard to have the big sister I admired so much see me at my worst.

Levi refused to take naps, though he needed them badly. I wasn't physically able to keep up with him and was allowing him to watch hours of TV every day. The schedules and boundaries that were so essential to Levi's well-being had fallen away, and he was obviously suffering.

It wasn't perfect. Just a few weeks postpartum, it was still difficult to physically enforce rules, so I made fewer of them. Naptime became quiet time. Messes stayed messy. And though I still felt like I was failing a lot of the time, I pretended otherwise. I stuffed my negative feelings down and acted like his tantrums didn't scare me; like I knew what I was doing. And that everything was going to be okay.

I was basically trying to achieve what parenting instructor Lansbury calls "confident momentum." "It's a positive, sometimes heroic kind of energy, an I-can-do-this-thing attitude of helpfulness that stems from the understanding that it's perfectly normal for young children to stall, resist and test limits," she writes on her website. "Our momentum is even more important if we have personal physical issues or very strong children," Lansbury continues, which is often the case in the wake of a birth.

I found that faking this sense of confidence was exactly what Levi needed from me. He was able to relax a bit, more secure in my ability to care for him and my apparent belief that everything was going according to plan. I felt good about being able to provide that, even if it was a false front.

A week after my sister left, I was able to pump some milk and leave George for a few hours so I could take Levi to the library and a new gelato place. He ate his pink grapefruit scoop in silence as I tried to make conversation. It felt like an awkward first date. But then, in the car ride home, he opened up. "George is not my boy," he said. "He's not my best friend." I took a deep breath. "I know, honey. You don't have to like him. You don't have to like any of this."

I ran into my neighbor Alissa Monte recently, and confessed how terrible the first month had been. She nodded. They'd added a second child to their family about a year before and, though I'd never noticed them suffering, apparently they'd been through similar heartbreak with their oldest.

"You know that big emotional sobbing fest, that hormone flush, that comes after you have a child?" Monte told me. "Well, for me, after our son was born, it happened when I looked at my daughter. And I was like, Oh. What we had was gone. That sounds dramatic, I know."

Recognizing the pain caused by the birth of a new baby can feel strange, even wrong. After all, a baby is a blessing. You're not supposed to have negative feelings around your child's birth. But owning our feelings of loss is not a judgment on these babies, and it doesn't negate what they add to our lives. In fact, it's a necessary part of moving forward.

"There's something about the heartbreak of getting a younger sibling," said Monte. "It's like it takes what was there and burns it away and it's raw. But what's left, what gets rebuilt, is beautiful."

When things felt fractured, I grieved, and then kept going. Life slowly got easier. My body was healing, and at six weeks postpartum I was able to pick up Levi and hold him again. Soon, I was able to sweep my tantruming toddler into my arms, hug him and assure him he would always be my baby. Our days became more structured, my confidence increased and his outbursts subsided. He's still 3, so it's not like they were going to go away altogether, but they have lessened in frequency and ferocity.

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