Just some thoughts...

I guess I've forgotten about blogging in the last little while. No, I don't have an excuse. :) Here's just a couple of thoughts for ya.

• Life of Fred is the best Math Book EVER!!! I have never liked doing math for years until I started doing Life of Fred, if it just awesome! 

Flex-Force Pellets are awesome, I've been giving them to Idaho for a couple of months it is super cheap and works GREAT! I keeps her from getting stiff as I train her. If I had a horse in more stressful training I would probably buy something like this. But for now this works great and is about 1/3 of the price. I buy it here. They usually have the best prices and shipping etc.

• Feed Flax Seed to your horse for extra shine, better hoof quality and overall wellness. I feed 1 TBS a day(1 oz) but you can feed up to 1 cup(8 oz) a day. I love the stuff! I buy it in bulk from Winco.

 

• If you live in the Magic Valley the best radio station ever is 88.1 The Bridge! They play 100% Christian Music. I'm not a huge fan of the styles of the artists, but hey, it's clean music! So it's better than nothing!

• Roxy aborted her baby right before Christmas so we will not be having a baby this spring. She is healthy at least, I still have no idea what caused it. I have a secret fear that it was EHV, but none of the other horses were sick around that time and none of them have been exposed to other horses in MONTHS!! I am really hoping it wasn't EHV! She had a little bit of retained placenta so some oxytocin fixed her up. She was fine for two days and then got super sick and we gave her lots of antibiotics and NSAID's for a couple of days. It wasn't too fun to have to be running all over town to get drugs on Christmas Eve when we had a bunch of family over! But she was fine again after a day or two and she's been fine since then. I am going to have her cultured this month (hopefuly!) to make sure she is still good to breed this spring. It was cool I got to see the placenta this time(I didn't see Que's because Bailey was at the vets).

Sorry if this grosses you out! It was pretty awesome!!!

•  Christmas was good, we got to see lots of family which was sweet! We were able to have our big family dinner at our house this year, something that hasn't been able to happen for a while. :)

• We also were able to go to the Care Center again to deliver lap quilts on Christmas day. It is a special tradition that I love! 

(Kayti, Justin and I) This is the only picture we got...and it's super blurry...and it was super last second so it's all kind of silly looking. I love all of our faces. :)

 Hopefully that's all! See ya later...

Ugly Baby

Not loving her looks right now! Good thing she is so sweet and loving and loves people so much!

We've made a lot of improvement eh? This is even from a week ago, and looks even better than that!

I love her little nose, I don't know why, it's just cute...and soft...very soft...

The effects of barbed wire...don't click if you are sqeamish!!!

Meet our latest addition...

isn't she pretty!

...Tess. A great birthday gift if you ask me! We've got big plans me and her already! She is so fun to work with, I've been doing lots of Clinton Anderson stuff with her and she is really catching on, I can't wait until we get to vertical flexion!!

Grandpa's Quilt

This spring I got to make this BEAUTIFUL quilt for my dear great grandpa Leonard.

I have wanted to make this quilt for a long time and this was the perfect excuse!

The idea came from a quilt a a dear friend's house.

I have stared at that quilt for a LONG time and finally drew up the blocks on graph paper.

Now, i finally got to make it!

I want to make one for me now!

Sorry, the rest of the pictures won't load :( I was going to show you how to make the blocks.

Maybe later!

Beautiful.

Thursday I witnessed one of the most beautiful and sacred things on earth. Birth.

Meet, out filly. Born on June 7, 2012 at about 10:30 am

Sorry if you are sqeamish about this picture, this is one of the only ones I could get to load! It's just the bag hanging out after her water broke, if you look really really hard you might be able to see the tips of the baby's feet.

It all happened soooo fast!

Bailey busted the gate to get out of her pen at about 6:45 am on thursday, I put her back in at about 7 and then fed her, then after we ate breakfast I put her into the pasture at about 9 am and I went to check on her at about 9:45 and I saw that she was starting to have contractions but I figured we still had several hours of first stage labor to wait through, so I ran and got Ma and when I came back her water had just broke! I called Cathy and she came over to watch

After she had been in active labor for about 25 minutes we could still only see her(the filly's) front feet so we called her(Cathy's) husband Wendell to bring his calf pullers to pull the thing out and in the mean time Cathy and I started pulling and we got the nose out and broke the sack so that she could breath(she was starting to suffocate)

when he got there he slipped the chains on and we started pulling she came about 3-4 minutes after that.

It was kind of a rought birth, and if we hadn't of been there poor Bailey would have been dead 3 times over, NOT KIDDING!!!

Because 1, the filly was too big for her( and she is a maiden mare) and she was starting to give up and she was reaching that 30 minute mark where the foal will die if left in longer than that so Wendell the AWESOME and me had to pull her out. (Wendell's wife Cathy is AWESOME to and helped a ton as well!)

2. because right when the baby was born the umbilical cord broke instead of staying attached and she was squirting blood everywhere so we got that tied off with a bit of twine and

3. she had a retained placenta and after about 5 injections of oxytocin per the dr's orders(i'm so glad I bought some ahead of time even though ma had to pick up some more that day 'cause I ran out!) it still wasn't coming so we had to take her to the vet at about 7 pm the same day and the poor vet had to manually remove most of it. she and the baby had to spend the night in Gooding because it still wasn't coming. The vet said she passed it about an hour and a half after we left I think we left at about 8:30. He had been peeling away the placenta that WHOLE time, it was still very firmly attatched I guess!

AND if all of that wasn't enough, she wasn't producing enough milk for the baby even though she had been STREAMING milk for WEEKS!!! I had thought that that much oxytocin would stimulate enough milk( that is one if its properties) if that was a problem, but it didn't, maybe we have fescue grass in our pasture that I didn't know about??? So now she is on oral domperidone to help with that, along with banamine(a NSAID) to help combat the threat of laminits from the retained placenta. She also got a shot of long lasting antibiotics at the vets...sooooo...she's pretty drugged up!

that baby is just so stinking cute! But I still can't figure out what color she is...any ideas anybody? she's sort of buckskiny but she's startin to get what sort of looks like a dorsal stripe, but neither of her parents have a dun gene. her legs also fade out instead of get darker so maybe she won't go buckskin. Who knows! I'm just hoping that she doesn't go red(sorrel, chestnut or blood bay) but brown might be okay! But I think that it would be pretty hard to because of the stud's genetics, I've only ever seen color out of him, even when breeding to a red mare like Bailey.

Another funny thing about her is the filly was supposed to be a colt from the ultrasound, so we didn't really look when she was born, we had all just been calling it a him for 9 months! But about five hours later I was playing with her and realized it wasn't a him, it was a HER!!! So we have a filly instead of a colt, I thought I was DONE with mares, sheesh!

And no, she does not have a name yet. However my mom's cousin Sid(the stud's owner) said that we should call her question or q for short since her forehead marking looks kind of like a question mark and because of her interesting and questionable gender.

They are both healthy and happy now, dispite their trauma! Isn't she sooooo cute???

This was her last night Bailey had been an AWESOME mom so far!


I'll try to post more pictures later...

Up to date

we've done a lot since I posted last, here's a bit to catch ya up!

Plimoth Plantation

Yesterday we went to plimoth plantation, it was pretty cool! I didn't blog about it yesterday because I elected for a 3 hour nap instead when we got home!]

but this is what we did yesterday...

The "moo-flower"

a guy making some cool pottery he made it look so easy!

This is in the meetinghouse in the village where they would have town meetings, church and it could serve as a fort when the indians would attack

walking down from the meetinghouse into the village

this is the upstairs of the meetinghouse which had several cannons

Luke giving a visual of what happens when they(the cannons) are fired!

Almost every house had a suit of armor in it, Luke thought it was pretty cool! {but maybe just a tad bit big??}

Jared thought it was cool too!

One of the ladies in a house was out of 'winegar' (vinegar) and needed some more so she sent Luke on an errand to get some more from her Mother. He was very proud to oblige her, can you tell he likes posing??!!

Wow! these were the first cows I had seen on our whole trip so far!!!!!! We are a loooong way from home! Ma said I should have my pic taken to prove that they do have cows in MA!! I still haven't seen a hay truck...hmmm...I'll keep my eyes peeled, but the freeways back here aren't full of semi's like at home...

We thought this was a really cool wood stack, we should attempt it in  the fall with the Bishop at the King's place! This stack was huge!!! (Little boys were more than happy to stand in as a reference!)

an example of a typical hosue...

Inside an indian hut looking at the arrows...

Caleb grinding some corn for supper!

what the outside of that hut looks like that Luke was in...

the same hut, it's hard to see but the thing was HUGE!!!

Caleb inside a indian canoe

they were burning out another canoe...

all of us inside another hut

lots of this...

after we were done at the villages we went to Firendly's for lunch, Friendly's is a must when you're on the east coast!

Afterwards we went to part 2 of Plimoth Plantation which is at a different spot, it includes:

THE Plymouth Rock, it has a 1620 carved into it

The Mayflower 2, which is a full size replica of THE Mayflower, and us standing in front of it again...

It really is a pretty small ship, really small actually, to fit over 130 people on it for several months at a time! WOW! Impressed!

One of the guys showed us how they would have used this tool that I forgot the name of, but it plays a role in lifting the anchor, and in lifting almost any heavy thing that they needed help with

Luke trying to 'steer' the ship!

Later Gators!

Thursday on the beach

wow! we've made it to Thursday already! Today we got to see some pretty cool stuff! Beware, this is a VERY picture heavy post again!

To start the day we had breakfast and played on the beach...

this is the view from our back porch!

 then Jared hid from the camera!...

After that we went to see John Adams' houses...

On the trolley...no, we didn't pose for this picture!

the house where John Adams was born...

The place where John Quincey was born

they are right next to each other, this is the only picture I have to prove it but the cream colored building is John Q.'s birthplace and the brown house in the corner is John sr.'s birthplace. They are on the same lot and very close together.

and last but not least...the place where John Adams died and where he lived for a long time, it's about a mile away from the other houses. It really is a pretty house.

Jared

this is the fireproof library that was built to protect John Q's books!! It's a HUGE library!!!

a plague like thingy to commemorate John Q and his wife Louisa Catherine in their church

John Adams' plaque in the same church

the church had a cool little organ in the balcony in the back

a closer view of the organ

this is the pew that John Q sat in when he was alive

my mom and dad standing by John and Abigail's graves which are in the basement of the same church

this are John Q. and Louisa Catherine's graves they are in the same room

Jared standing in front of the gate of their tombs

 then, we went back into the visitor's center and bought some ice cream from the neighboring shop...

then we drove home and fried some hamburgers for dinner and then the boys wanted to brave the cold and go swimming again...

Meanwhile I sat on the rocks because it was COLD!

we weren't finding any good stuff like last night and the boys finally realized that it was FREEZING so us kids hightailed it home,

 but that's when mom and dad found the good stuff!!

a big fish!

and a big crab!

See ya later!

oh, P.S I have a really fun quilt to show you when I get home!