The Busy Season…

Trying to get ready for Christmas and still try to fit in the barn is definitely a challenge when you’re a single parent!

By the end of the day you’re tired and then you have to go out and sit there.  It’s also a fair bit of walking!

Anyway, the weather has been good for us, exceptionally good, which is excellent since I, unfortunately, need new tires but can’t afford them!

Last week my daughter was included in a text message that all night feeders have to clean all the stalls if they’re dirty, that a horse isn’t to be put into a dirty stall.  That she does what she can.  Of course it comes on a Wednesday.

I have a bad back.  I can’t tolerate the constant and unchanging position of cleaning out stalls.  My daughter, from all her falls, has bunged up her shoulder to the point that cleaning stalls is painful too.  It was originally two stalls, now it’s six, IF they haven’t been done ahead of time.

So today, with it being Christmas holidays, we’re going out for 1:00 as my daughter has a make-up lesson to teach.  While she teaches, I’m going to slowly work on the stalls taking breaks to sit down.  When the lesson is done, the two of us can work on the remaining stalls.  We can bring in hay, fill water buckets and then she can ride.   When her ride is over, we’ll feed grain, hopefully starting at 4:30.  Even though it might be a bit early for some people’s liking, I’d like to have the horses in between 5:30-6 and be on the road home.

Can’t have the best of both worlds and I’m not going to sit around to wait for the “right” time for horses to come in.

On the other hand, I really hope that someone has gone down and cleaned out at least four of the stalls already!!

It’s definitely time for my daughter to get a job and start paying the $60/month that we “make” doing chores.  $15/week isn’t much considering this sudden increase in work!

Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!  We’ll see you on the other side!

Chores…

Well, chores.  For three Wednesdays now we have been trying to get a tight grip on chores.  I’ve been making up the grain, but we seem to fall short somewhere in the middle of it all.  My daughter has to go off to teach at 5:30.  Of course we have something else against us–it’s dark by 5:00!  It’s incredibly difficult to feed horses when you can’t find them!

This past week we get a text asking if we can clean out two stalls because the morning people who usually do it didn’t show up!  A few curse words fell from this horsey mom’s lips as she began to weed out poop from the shavings on the floors of the stalls.  I piled it all up in a corner for my daughter to do the heavy lifting but that never happened, I can’t remember why now.

So despite having a plan–get the grain all made up and distributed between 4:30 and 5:30–it has yet to be executed to perfection.

She’s loving teaching though!  The beginners, she says, are boring.  But we all start somewhere!  She loves teaching the two girls she has that are slightly more advanced.  She can do things with them.  I’ve explained that the other two kids will reach that point and she will be the one to get them there.  That will be a fantastic feeling–I have personal experience!

Well, it’s off to the barn shortly to pick her up from her lesson.  Oh, and get more stuff on our poor pony’s leg as she still has mud fever.

Yikes!

The Show Must Go On…

And so it did!!

It was a huge success.  A little slow but if you’re just starting out, get used to that!

My daughter, who chose to ride Hunter with 2′ jumps decided to come off (fall) during warm-up.  Same as last time, the horse decided she wasn’t going to go over the jump and she turned.  My daughter hit her hip on the base of a standard but her other leg flew over and slammed into the flower box under the jump.  That leg hurts worse, or at least for now.  We’ll see how she’s feeling when she wakes up.

She took 4th in the Costume Class (it was a Halloween show) and then she took 4th in Hunter on the Flat, 3rd in Hunter over jumps (where she had fallen off in warm-up) and 5th in Equine over jumps and on the Flat combined because her leg was hurting so much the stirrup leather was digging in.

There will be a Christmas show and hopefully all will be well for the two of them!

She is also going to be teaching a total of 4 kids which is also terrific for her.  We decided taking on chores on Wednesday nights–hmmmmm…..

I’ll keep you posted on how that works out!