Category Archives: kids

Musical horses?

This week has involved a number of horse rides, but few on the normal mount pairings. On Monday, I did a trail ride with the kids – Alex on Devil, Vicki on Precious, and Amanda with me on King. Tonight, I went for a run with Amanda in the jogging stroller and came home to Vicki trotting around bareback, Alex riding King, and Anna on Precious. Amanda actually is happy riding with anyone that will let her up, and Alex thinks it is tons of fun to ride with his little sister. When they were on King together, no matter how much Alex kicked, King wouldn’t move until I let him know it was OK to walk around.

I guess it’s good to build confidence on different horses!

Relaxing trail ride

This afternoon the temps were in the low 50s so I saddled up King, Alex got Precious, and Vicki prepped Devil. The 3 of us went out for a 45min trail ride. What made this ride different is we went exploring on new trails the horses had not seen and to get there, we have to walk 1/2 mile of road.

The ponies did great along the road. Vicki was a little nervous during the ride, but Devil wasn’t. Better than the other way around.

Along the trail, we came to a water crossing. After a little initial refusal, King finally decided it was safe to cross. Both ponies crossed without a care.

Then we rode around some open fields. King was full of spunk, so we did some cantering circles and a little galloping across the fields while the ponies walked the edges. Alex and Precious did a little trot work, but Vicki decided to just walk (Devil was fine with that).

In the end, it was a great confidence booster for the kids and reaffirms that we have excellent ponies.

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Every weekend should be 4 days

2 day weekends are junk.  There is hardly enough time to really get started on anything, let alone complete a project.  If we always had Friday to get ready for the projects, and Monday to wrap them up, we would get a lot more accomplished around here.  Instead, Friday I was at work (all day) and then loaded the barn with hay after I got home.

Anna did some running around on Saturday morning, so I was basically inside watching kids.  I did help with some cleaning in the house.

Saturday night was date night at the Dolphin Scholarship Auction.  It was a lot of fun and we even bought a couple of things for ourselves (including a wine tasting at Jonathon Edwards Winery just around the corner from our house).

We had chicks hatching this weekend, unfortunately, the results were quite poor.  I recently completed build a new hatcher for the chick operations.  This was the first batch to hatch inside, and we discovered some design flaws.  Monday night is overhaul for the hatcher because the next batch will move in for hatching on Tuesday.

2 rabbits had litters on Saturday and we have 9 new additions to the rabbitry.  That’s actually low because 1 doe had 11, but only 2 survived.  We are not sure what the issue was, so we will be monitoring her performance carefully on the next litter.  You know what they say about meat rabbits: you can always eat the mistakes.

Sunday morning was spent working on some chores/cleanup around the farm until Alex and I went to the Blue and Gold Banquet for Cub Scouts where Alex received his Bear rank.  We also had 2 customers over today for buying chicks.  I love having other people who are interested in the self-sustaining movement out to our farm, and while they might show up to buy chicks, we end up talking about goats, rabbits, vegetables, and everything else.

Tonight was project time on the whizbang chicken plucker.  It should be complete in another day or so and then we will give it a test run.  I plan to have video of the first use.

See what I mean? 2 days didn’t hardly get anything done.

Amanda loves her goat milk

It’s a dreary Saturday morning.  Since the morning chores are done and Anna is gone with Vicki for some shopping, I am inside with Alex and Amanda.  I was working on researching some plans on the computer when Amanda came and grabbed my arm, repeating “goat milk Betty.”  Betty is our only doe in milk right now, and at dinner the other night I was talking with Alex and Vicki about how they should appreciate what Betty provides for us.  Apparently Amanda has been listening too.  Well, earlier I had actually already poured Amanda a cup of milk, but she wanted it in a different cup.  In addition, when I simply transferred her milk from one cup to another, she got very upset. She refused to take the cup from me until I actually added some milk out of the container in the fridge so she could see it was “goat milk Betty”.   As soon as I did that, she grabbed the cup and started drinking.  Spoiled kid.