Baby Pictures

I had better luck with today’s camera and put an album of foal pictures

On the Fridge.

They still aren’t as good as I’d like them to be but taking pictures of a colt and his nervous mama in a dimly lit stall isn’t as easy as it sounds. :)

What A Weekend!

I’m not sure how we fit everything that we did into a mere 48 hours this weekend. This picture gives away the end of the story, but I couldn’t resist.

We started working at the barn at 5:30 Saturday morning. We agreed to do it for one last weekend and it was more than enough. Rich was kind enough to help out this time and so everything went much faster. From there, we went to Reagan’s track meet. She ran the 75m hurdles in 17.4 seconds. It wasn’t the best time there, but she was pleased (and I was relieved) that she didn’t hit a single hurdle and wasn’t the last one across the line. She wants to try again next weekend so she can improve her time. I really admire her spunk and self-confidence. Goodness knows that I didn’t have half of it in 7th grade. It’s too bad that 7th grade track is a largely un-coached sport. Her school doesn’t have a track to practice on and the coaches are all volunteers who don’t seem terribly invested in the outcome of the meets, so she’s largely on her own in learning the hurdles.

From there we headed to Faith’s soccer game. Her team won again - this time 3-0. She was a bit tired from her zoo trip the day before but as always was fun to watch.

Then it was back to the barn for afternoon chores and to check on the pregnant mares. No baby. No sign that a baby was coming. Sigh.

On Sunday, Reagan and I were on our own for morning chores, but it was the last time so we soldiered through them and then came home and went back to bed, totally missing church. Heathens, is what we are. After our naps and an attempt to straighten up just a tiny bit around here, it was back to the barn where we rushed through feeding everyone and loaded Jamboree up to take her to a riding clinic. Just so you know, Jamboree does not like to be rushed or loaded up. That part was not so fun, but the clinic was wonderful and we learned a lot. This picture is actually from last week, not the clinic, but the girl and the horse are so pretty together that I’m throwing it in here.

Unfortunately I had to miss Hayden’s flag football game because I was with Reagan. He got to play quarterback and . . . they won! Hallelujah! The long losing streak is over. Rich tells me that in this picture, Hayden is “breaking through the double team.” Yeah, I don’t know what that means.

Finally, as it was getting dark last night, Reagan and I headed back to the barn with Jamboree. We put her away and started watering the horses and closing their stalls for the night. When I got to the mares’ stall, I glanced in and there was a baby! He was little and shivery and still wet and oh so adorable. I yelled for Reagan to go get the barn manager and she ran her best time ever in the process. :) They had just checked the mare an hour before and she hadn’t indicated that she had plans for the evening. That was a quick labor!

We stood for an hour and watched all of the necessary stuff for caring for a newborn foal. Unfortunately I had a long range lens in a small space and so my pictures weren’t terrific. I’ll try again tomorrow. Here’s the manager, Mark, with the colt.

Zoo

It has been absolutely gorgeous here this week. Like spring was really and truly here for good. Temps were in the seventies, all of the lawns suddenly were green and our city’s many flowering trees are in full bloom. It was a great time to take the second graders to the zoo. Or so you’d think.

Today it was 40 degrees, misting and very, very windy. Sigh. Fortunately smart people designed this zoo. They realized that a city with sub-zero temps in the winter and summer highs in the 100’s needs a zoo with lots of indoor displays. Entire buildings are devoted to desert, jungle, oceanic and primate habitats. It’s really a fabulous place, unfortunately it’s also quite a drive, so early this morning we loaded up overly excited children, reluctantly shoved back into their winter coats, and headed out. I had Faith’s friends, Ashley and Danielle in my group. Here they are, (Faith, Ashley, Danielle from L to R):

The

closest

zoo to us, the one we go to for quick trips, is a nice little Children’s Zoo with camels and monkeys and small animal displays. There a some gibbons there that all of the local children have learned you can “talk” too. Gibbon noises are extremely easy to imitate and very loud. If you make their noise loudly enough, over and over again they will reward you by whooping back at you. The girls were really eager to try out this trick on new gibbons. Turns out they are fluent in Gibbonese and can speak it to anyone. I just with that this hadn’t attracted quite so many irritated looks from people who didn’t appreciate their skill.

These three girls are not meek or mild. No, no, no. These are loud, rough and tumble, boy-chasing, boldly laughing girls. In fact, mothers who were shepherding groups of boys were looking at me with pity. Whatever distance I walked through the zoo today, they easily doubled by running back and forth. All three fell asleep on the long bus ride home which would have been an adorable picture. I wasn’t on the bus though - darn? - so I’ll end with this one instead.

My CPR Class

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I spent the morning in a CPR/AED certification class. It was actually pretty neat. The last time I took CPR it was 1986ish and I was in a jr. lifesaving class. I just remember that it seemed really complicated and that the Resuscitation Annie doll seemed kind of gross. We were sitting in a wet locker room at the pool, giggling over the whole thing and I’m pretty sure I didn’t learn much.

CPR is now much easier. You do a straightforward 30 chest compressions, followed by 2 rescue breaths over and over until your patient recovers or a more qualified individual shows up. We were told to place our hands for compression on the chest right between the nipples. The best question was when someone wanted to know what to do if you were trying to resuscitate an older woman whose large breasts have succumbed to gravity. There was a pause as we all tried to imagine giving compressions somewhere between the navel and the knees. Finally the instructor advised us to do compressions between where the nipples

should

be. Good to know.

Automate External Defibrillators

are really neat. Learning how to use one kind of made me hope that sometime soon I’ll be walking through the mall and someone will collapse near me. Bystanders will panic, but I’ll keep my cool and yell for someone to call 911 and call for an AED which will magically appear beside me. Then, because I’ll be the only one in the crowd to know how to use it, I’ll get to try out what is basically a dummy-proof lifesaving device and be a hero. Hopefully the victim will be a rich, childless person who feels really, really grateful. I do not want this to happen at school though. Adult strangers are better for this imaginary scenario than familiar children.

Here are a few tips for you if you’re going to collapse in front of me:

1) Try not to be choking, I didn’t really get to practice that technique.
2) If you are a hairy chested man, it might be best if you just start regularly shaving your upper right, and lower left chest areas. That way I won’t have to do it for you with the dry, disposable razor provided in the kit

.

pastedGraphic

3) Please try to have your nipples where they are supposed to be. The guesswork makes me nervous.
4) You are lucky, because I now have a disposable barrier on my keychain (jealous? you can get your own

here

) so that we don’t need to exchange germs during rescue breathing. However, I can still smell you so try to avoid garlic or coffee that day.
5) Do NOT, under any circumstance, vomit while I’m giving you CPR because at that point, you’re on your own. Okay, I would probably still do chest compressions, but the rescue breathing is over.

A Quick Study

Sometimes it takes years to learn important things. Examples: I left my hair blonde for much too long before I learned that it looked and felt better brown. I have been making pie crusts for years and still only get them right about half the time. It took about 14 years of marriage to realize that I can’t actually change him - not that I’d want to of course - and sometimes I still forget.
Other times, you can learn things really quickly. For instance, after just two days I have learned that I

never

want to be a horse rancher and even if I lived somewhere where I could keep my own horses, I wouldn’t have more than three.
We got up at 4:30 the last two days to be at the barn by 5:00 to clean 23 stalls, clean up after ourselves and water the stall occupants. The first day I felt it was doable. Today, every muscle in my back and shoulders is screaming and that’s with a healthy dose of my favorite new food: ibuprofen.
I was all set to quit this afternoon, but Reagan wants to keep going (though it should be noted that she does not do any real scooping. She is is charge of raking and watering) and Rich thinks we should give it at least one more week. Stay tuned . . .

In other weekend news:

Reagan

had her first track meet. She was about in the middle of the pack on long jump; her 4x100 team won their race and she was not last in the 200. Also, she didn’t cry which makes her a better athlete than her mother.

Faith

’s soccer team won 1-0. It would have been higher, but the other team had a really good goalie.

Hayden

’s football team lost by one touchdown, but they actually scored two touchdowns themselves this week for the first time so everyone was in a good mood.

Tomorrow my school is closed for a teacher work day and I have to go get certified in CPR for my job. That’s slightly hilarious because I’m about the last person you’d want by your side in a medical emergency. Blood makes me faint and if you vomit, I’ll vomit with you. Still, CPR is a valuable life skill so I don’t mind going.

Just Come Out Already

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Last night at 9:00 it was my turn to check the pregnant mares. It was cold and rainy outside so no one else was at the barn when I got there which was nice. I didn’t even turn on the lights above the stalls because I didn’t want to wake up non-pregnant horses. I just crept past all of them in the dark and listened to their sleepy horse sounds and inhaled their lovely horsey smell. I know - not everyone thinks that horses smell lovely, but I just think it’s the best. It’s not nearly as nice as sleeping baby smell, but it is much better than sleeping teenager smell.

The mares are penned at the end of the arena in a nice area that has a door to outside, lots of pacing room and secure stalls for birthing with heat lamps over them. I checked them first for obvious, physical signs of labor (they do NOT like cold hands on their teats - go figure) and then just sat back and watched them for a while.

Anyone who knew me while I was pregnant with Faith will understand the thoughts going through my brain. Let’s just say that I looked a lot like an overdue mare there towards the end and probably weighed nearly as much. I am grateful that Faith did not have four legs with which to kick me, but I wish that I had been able to pin my ears back to warn people who approached me that I wasn’t feeling friendly.

After I’d been there a while, the mares decided I was okay and came over for scratches. It is very satisfying to make an enormously pregnant creature feel even a little bit better so I scratched and scratched some more and they closed their eyes kind of drowsily and sighed and relaxed as best they could with their crazily undulating bellies.

I was there much longer than necessary for a “check” because I was really, really hoping to see any sign of imminent birth. Turns out that if you stand there long enough and hope hard enough . . . nothing happens except that your imagination goes into overdrive and you start interpreting every little twitch as labor. Finally I

gave

up and drove home. Still, the babies will be here soon and I’ll post pictures. I thought about posting my own pregnancy pictures to illustrate this story but I’m too proud. I only allowed them to be taken when I was pregnant with Reagan. In addition to be shockingly big, I had an

awful

haircut. Rich thought that I might look good with Joan Lunden’s hair. I did not. No matter how much I wanted to look like a blonde, slim model-looking anchorwoman, a simple haircut wasn’t going to do it. I just looked like I had a tiny head with a mushroom sitting on top that was completely out of proportion to the rest of me. So I’ll just let you look at Joan today and will post pictures of precious foals when they come.

Another Job With Poop

Starting this weekend, Reagan and I have a new job. We are going to be doing the weekend chores at the barn where we board Jamboree. That means that we go out between five and six a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays to clean out stalls and water the horses. Then we return in the evenings to feed and water everyone and close up the barn.

Why am I getting up loooong before I want to for this? Mostly for the experience. Reagan, like many girls, wants to be a horse rancher when she grows up. She says this all the time, but the truth is that she really has very little idea what it takes to care for them. We have never actually fed our own horse or cleaned her stall. This will be very educational. Also, of course, doing this will help pay for boarding the horse and Reagan should be responsible for some of that at this point. However, she’s not old enough to do it on her own (or drive herself) which is why I now have another poopy job. For the next few weeks though it’s going to be extra fun because there are two pregnant mares due any time so we’ll get to help care for the foals. What’s better than that??

I just wish that we could be having this wonderful, educational experience later in the day. This Saturday we will get up at 4:30 to do the horses, then come home and get Reagan changed and ready for her track meet at 8:00. She is running the 200 and doing the long jump. We will leave from there to take Faith to her soccer game. Rich and Hayden are bailing on us because they have tickets to the University’s spring football game. I’m thinking we’ll be eating take out on Saturday night.

In other news, PTO elections were held last night and I declined the nomination to be Vice President again. That felt very good. I will still be doing the fundraiser though. Next October when I am insane over that fact, remind me that it seemed like a great idea in April. Also, the Pooping Bandit is still on the loose. The principal is finally on the case, but no luck yet.


I did type up a couple of recipes and stuck them In the Fridge.

Starting Over

There’s a really long, technical reason about why my blog has been down. Rich could explain it to you in detail, but when you regained consciousness you would probably not understand much better than I do now. What he would like everyone to know is this: Apple, and iWeb, are to blame.

Everything I’ve written over the past year still exists on my computer but I can’t get it here. Were I a patient and detail oriented person I would rebuild. Thankfully I am not, so I can have a life instead. I will eventually try to get the recipes and pictures back up, but the blog entries are dead. So here we go - starting fresh!

Here are the highlights since I was last able to post:

-Spring sport season is upon us.

Faith is back in soccer. Hayden is playing flag football. His football team is not any better than his soccer team was. Reagan and her horse, Jamboree, are gearing up for the upcoming show season.

-The kids and I went to Denver for spring break

. I had my worst cold in years while I was there and spent most of the time in bed. Faith threw up. Three days later, Hayden threw up. Two days later, Reagan threw up. The day after that I threw up. We left Denver earlier than planned in the middle of this germ-fest. My parents and sisters were glad.

-Spring sports and spring break imply that it is spring

. Not so much. The soccer game was cancelled yesterday because it was 36 degrees and the fields were soggy from a week of light snow and heavy rain.

-I officially decided that I am NOT going to my 20 year reunion this summer.

The issue is that while there are people that I would like to catch up with, it’s a long trip trip on the same weekend as Reagan’s 13th bday. Also, my reunion committee wants us to pay $160 to spend four hours at the Denver aquarium. I would much rather spend $50 and hang out for six hours in a comfortable spot where people can relax and be themselves. Or as much themselves as people can be at a high school reunion. I do have curiosity and a desire to reconnect with certain people though so I have joined Facebook. So far, I’ve been able to catch up with three people that I haven’t talked to in forever. It’s been so much fun!
-

Cooking is no longer something I enjoy.

There will be fewer recipes posted here. Blame the fact that I have a job.

-Speaking of my job . . . the big news at school is our Pooping Bandit.

Every day a mystery boy goes into a bathroom and poops. He then takes the poop and stuffs it into the toilet paper dispenser. Gross right? I don’t care how much the custodians are paid - it isn’t enough. So far we can’t catch the Bandit, although I believe that if an administrator had to scrape out the bathroom every day a bigger effort at capture would be being made.
-

I need to lose the 10 pounds I’ve gained since Halloween.

I’m going to do that soon. Seriously. This week though, I’m enjoying the brownies that my sister, Beth, sent me from

Flying Monkey Patisserie

. So yummy.