The Thick of Things

End of June, I think I blinked and here it is! Sure feels like that anyways. We had a beautiful colt born May 25 from Special and Ritchie. His name is Jack. He's everything we'd been hoping for. A future hunter, I think. He's growing very well. I'm looking forward to string testing him at 3 months. I get the feeling this one will be a monster...

Showing has gone very well. My niece has taken to driving very well and my mom has had the time of her life sitting in the cart beside her with "Donk" pulling them around. Phillippe is keeping them safe and being as trustworthy a driver as I could have asked for. The kid definitely needs her own riding pony though, and that's in the works. We did the ADMC open fun show at the beginning of the month. I think it was a huge success, despite not having gigantic numbers. We did have a record number of long ears entered, at least for as long as I've been participating in the club. I was very proud of that. And everyone had a riot! There were a bunch of wins for each and every exhibitor including a new junior who earned a number of awards. That was so fun to see. Phillippe and Charo both did very well in Coon Jumping with baby Charo taking first place out of the minis! I couldn't believe how well Phillippe did with Myra handling him. They won the reserve high point junior award.

The next weekend was our driving club's pleasure show. Again, not as many entries as I was hoping for, but the weather turned out to be really nice! Ali had Pancake at the ADMC show for his first exposure to competition and driving in a formal sense. Well apparently that's exactly what he needed because they had a stellar day at the driving show! They even placed ahead of Falcor and I in a couple of classes. I'm good with that. Falcor couldn't stand still until the last class and broke into canter in his right rein lengthen trots. Since the judge I hired is a good friend of mine, I know she marked me harder. That's totally fine, I would do the same. But when it came to the reinsmanship pattern, I got to watch a few go ahead of me and noted the mistakes they made. When it came to our turn, I made sure to be as technical as I could and we won that class! We had so many prize sponsors, it was crazy! Everyone went home with a bag of Alfa-Tec cubes, plus the champions won gift certificates to a local feed store, with a hat. We had other random gift certificate prizes donated and Mad Barn swag. We even got to award a "best turnout" at this show! No, I didn't win it, but the lady who did really deserved to! Ali won the junior high piont with Pancake, my niece took reserve with Phillippe. And I got to have a fantastic time with my old man.

I sold Mavis last week. As much as I really enjoyed her, I did a string test on her and found she was not going to get near as tall as I needed her to in order to replace Falcor. So I sold her. The lady who took her I've known for a long time. She's got 2 young-adult twin daughters who are plenty handy, and a 10-year-old son. It's a great home, a wonderful family and I'll be able to follow along her further adventures. So the search for a Falcor replacement will continue. We've had 4" of rain in the last 3 days. It's insane, I didn't think we'd purchased lake-front property but here it is! I'm so thankful tha we live in a high spot in a home without a basement. Happy Horseing!