Eli Sold

What a fun day. It started with breakfast at the playground for the campers including Phil, Anna, Braelyn, Taegan, Israel, David, Sarah, Nolan, Karin, mom, Mark and I.
After breakfast Karin came over to work horses. First mare out was Wicktoria. Today we wanted to introduce her to the new mare.

Tori (Wicktoria) was given a good round pen reasoning lesson then put in the outdoor arena. Taegan and Kensley came out to watch.

Next out was Tatiana. This is such a beautiful mare. 

Love love love that mega hair Evan throws on his offspring. This 3 year old is out of our mare Marika. Evan does exactly what we want, throw hair and improve on the mare. She is a beautiful mare. She was introduced to Tori and there was absolutely no drama. Both mares were so glad for a companion. They were moved into the paddock next to Evan and Tori promptly showed. We got her covered by Valiant. Hope she goes out soon, because it looked like Tatiana also started to show and she too must be bred to Valiant. Jazz the outside mare was moved into the breeding shed paddock. We are hoping she will also start to show and her owners want her covered by Valiant too.  Poor Evan has no work until after Oksana delivers. The next job was to  work with each of the weanlings. Today after working them in the round pen each was given a leading lesson. Apollo was first. He is really improving with each day but consistency does wonders for foals.

He was led around the round pen using the golf cart then taken around the circle drive. The golf cart is strong enough to keep going if the foal thinks he or she doesn't have to move. They learn very quickly if they move forward the pressure stops.  The next foal out was Esther. She too drastically improved.

 Below Anna and Karin are taking her for a walk using the golf cart. Notice the nice loose lead rope. 

Whitney and Oksana were fascinated with the teaching process.

Star's filly, Elsa was the last foal worked with today. She is such a beautiful filly.

She did the best of all.  Next was the kids ride. Anna took Taegan and Kensley on Whitney while Nolan took Braelyn on Zalena. 

After that Nolan and Karin took the horses on the death trails. Funny how Whitney makes Zalena look small. Whitney will be leaving us Saturday so we are glad to have the use of her these last few days. 

 Rebekah brought her exchange student Ava over to ride. Below Rebekah is giving Ava a quick lesson on how to stop, turn, move forward and backward.  Check out that smile. Ava is from Tibet.

Right after they left a man and his wife arrived to look at a couple of the Friesian colts. They ended up buying Eli the orphaned colt. I didn't think he would last long. They promised to leave him here until early December. We want him nursing for at least 6 months off Sally.

He was very happy with him, gave us the deposit and signed a contract. The weanlings were all moved out of the stalls and into their own paddock. That meant a bale needed to be moved into that paddock and as long as Mark and I were moving bales the middle paddock also got another one. Both of the stallions will need bales later this week. This afternoon we went to the playground to watch more of the volley ball games. I didn't bring the camera. The pictures below are actually of Sunday's picnic and games.

We had a wonderful labor day weekend. Lots of family, lots of company and actually lots of work also got done. Late afternoon we had a haze move in and cover the sun eerily, it was hanging in the sky, a big orange ball. 

 It was like this for quite a while until thicker clouds rolled in and obscured it altogether. We were wondering why then found out this was caused from by all the smoke from the wildfires out west. 

 One very bad thing that happened is yesterday when we got home from church we noticed water coming out from under mom's driveway. Then I was walking over to the barn and noticed a big puddle up at the main hydrant at the farm. I thought someone had left the hose on and didn't think too much about it until this morning. We have a big water leak. Mike worked on it this evening and found one of the leaks but even with that shut off the meter is still running. There must be a pretty big leak underground. It is just too much of a coincidence that both leaks occurred on the same day and we wonder if the water company sent out water at much to great of pressure. Tomorrow we will be without water. Hope we find the leak quickly, all of these nursing mares are going to need a lot of water.