Who's a pretty girl?

Apollo is!

Truly, 2026 is a year of surprises for us.  Here's how this tale unfolded:

I discovered a tick on the back of Apollo's ear late Saturday evening, which caused us a mini-freakout and me learning how to remove a tick with a beveled notch cut into a conveniently expired credit card.  I managed to get the body out without squishing it and as it turns out, the head minus a bit of mouth parts still embedded in the skin, which I couldn't for the life of me get out with the tweezers we had on hand.  I dabbed it with rubbing alcohol to sterilize the area, dropped the tick into a vial of rubbing alcohol to kill it and save for testing, then set to doing a stupid amount of research on ticks.

The research lead me to spending 2 hours on Monday morning calling every exotics vet not already on my short go-to list in a 2 hour drive radius trying to find someone who would see Apollo for a tick bite.  There are way too many 'exotics' vets who don't update their websites to indicate that they no longer have an exotics vet on staff.  Also too many that are fully booked and it would take over a week to get an appointment emergency or no.  Finally, I managed to get Apollo seen at 11am on Tuesday!

Apollo, Mr. Giraffe, and I headed out in the rain to the vet's Tuesday morning.  The entire vet staff was completely wrapped around Apollo's tiny paw in record time!  The little munchkin clocks in at 1.8 pounds, got a check-up (teeth, heart/lungs, tummy are all good), had a fecal exam and Gram stain done (no parasites found and the slide looked normal), got a dose of ivermectin under the scruff to take care of any potential other ticks as well as mites and parasites, got the first dose of the RHDV2 vaccine, got the tick mouth parts removed, and a quick gender check for later spay/neuter surgery scheduling revealed that Apollo was a little girl.  The exotics vet said that so long as she doesn't develop any symptoms by the weekend, we should be in the clear (they really don't want to use antibiotics unless absolutely necessary due to the harm it could cause her gut flora).

She was a very brave little munchkin and we decided that we're going to keep her name Apollo because she's already answering to it and the name suits her.

Apollo being a female will make bonding with Naomi more difficult, but not impossible.  We're going to take the bonding even slower now and see how things go.  Either way, we're going to have two chaos buns in the house!

Just a bun havin' fun!

Naomi has discovered the soccer ball and is having a blast rolling it around the living room!

Baby bunny zoomies!

We're pretty sure Apollo is the first baby bun to reach ludicrous speed.

More bunny kisses!

So far so good with the slow bonding.  If things go well today, we may try a short face-to-face encounter on neutral ground this weekend (Apollo will be 10 weeks old then).  At that point, they'll have been in side-by-side enclosures for almost a week.

Apollo is eating well and slowly learning not to stand in his water dish.  He is not a fan of the litter scoop and has tried to pick a fight with it when I remove the wet bedding from around his water dish.  That is his wet bedding, and it's just the way he likes it!

They both make it a point to binky in front of the other's cage when it's their turn for playtime (usually the other is oblivious to their antics because they're either eating or flopped).  They also mimic one another with eating hay and cleaning, so they're getting a bit more synchronized.

Thanks for visiting the blog and we hope you all have a great weekend!  Stay safe out there and we'll be back with more bunny cuteness on Monday.

Mlem!

As is tradition, I had to get a pic of baby Apollo next to a Coke can.  His little tongue sticking out is cracking me up!

Baby Apollo's first shenanigan!

The evening we brought him home, I was on the phone with my brother when I glanced over and saw this.  Apollo actually hopped down when I asked him to, came over and let me give him noogies as he checked out my phone.  His 'uncle' was on speaker calling him a "silly little wabbit" as the little fella was nose-bonking my phone.

In other news, the little munchkin is doing really well with the whole litter box training thing!

Day #2 with baby Apollo.

Naomi and Apollo are giving each other kisses through the cage bars!

The little fella hopped up onto the pellet container to try to give Naomi kisses.

She was so excited that she was biting the cage bars (she does this when treats or anything else she likes is in-bound despite our best efforts to train her out of it), so I had to gently steer the little fella away because she gets in the zone when she's spun-up excited. Baby Apollo was so offended that I was trying to keep him away from his new friend that he lightly boxed at my hands. Sorry little buddy--it's for your own good; you can give her kisses later. (Don't want a misunderstanding if his little nose was accidentally nibbled!)