Things have been pretty heavy around here lately. Our local governments have been wrestling with big, serious stuff — homelessness, recalls, giant data centers. All of it is racing toward our communities like a freight train. So today, we’re hitting the brakes and doing something totally different. Something fluffy.
I was chatting with one of our readers the other day, catching up on life, when I mentioned that we’d just added a new four-legged friend to our house: a Holland Lop bunny named Teddy. The second I said it, my reader practically shouted, “You HAVE to write about that!”
So here we go. It’s a little different for this newsletter, I know. But here we go. This is the story of Teddy.
To understand Teddy, you have to go back a few years to Cosmo, our first family pet. He was a guinea pig, and honestly, he was the best. My wife and I picked a guinea pig because I remembered having them as a kid and thinking they were basically tiny, squeaky little balls of fur. Guinea Pigs made good pets for our kids, pretty docile and generally non-agressive. I have happy memories of coloring huge coloring books with my daughter on the living floor with Cosmo there watching us swap crayons and my daughter reminding me to stay within the lines.
Cosmo stuck around for about nine years, which is basically ancient in guinea pig years. He watched our kids grow from little rugrats into full-blown teenagers. Near the end, his health took a hit. He had a few strokes and started slowing down. But he kept eating, kept squeaking at us, and kept being generally adorable, so our family — okay, really my wife — became his personal hospice nurses. He passed away last November, and he earned every bit of that spoiling.
Fast forward to this summer. Our daughter started begging for a new pet. My wife and I were firmly, absolutely, one-hundred-percent against it. We’d just been through the whole Cosmo situation and were not ready to sign up for round two.
Then our daughter found a photo of a six-month-old Holland Lop bunny named Teddy. If you don’t know Holland Lops, they’re the bunnies with the floppy, droopy ears that make them look permanently sleepy and adorable. My daughter fell in love instantly and showed the picture to my wife.
And that’s when the wall cracked. My wife agreed to “just look into it” — which, if you’re a parent, you already know this getting dangerously close to “we’re getting the bunny.”
There was one giant catch: Teddy lived in Jacksonville, Florida. We live in Ohio. That is not exactly a quick drive to pick up a pet. We figured this was our escape hatch. No way were we road-tripping across several states for a rabbit my daughter found on the internet.
My wife called the breeder to politely back out. Thanks so much, but a multi-day road trip for a bunny just wasn’t in the cards. That’s when the breeder said something that changed everything.
“Oh, that’s not a problem,” she said. “We can put Teddy on the Hippity-Hop Express!”
My wife blinked. “The... who-what?”
Turns out, there’s a woman out of New Hampshire who spends about two weeks every month driving a van up and down the East Coast, delivering small pets to their new homes. Rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, ferrets — she hauls them all. I had genuinely no idea this job existed, but I’m kind of amazed that it does.
At this point, we figured we’d come too far to turn back. We booked Teddy a ticket on the Hippity-Hop Express. The van rolled out of its home base in New Hampshire, swung down to Florida to grab Teddy, and three days later, we met the driver and our new bunny in a Walmart parking lot off Miller Lane. Of course, there were other stops for the express, picking up and dropping off rodents in far flung places in Tennessee and Alabama.
So now Teddy, a former Florida beach bunny, is officially a Buckeye. He’s still adjusting to his new digs, but he’s already made his snack preferences very clear — cilantro is basically bunny gold. If any of you have bunny-parenting tips, send them our way. We have experience with some of these fur balls, but a rabbit is something new.
Announcing our September Community Survey!
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