Agriculture

The Tale of a Trip to the Vet

If there is one horse at my house that is loved more than any other horse, it would be Aloha. When it comes to kid broke horses, she’s there. Any horse can have an off day, but in the general realm of life, if she knows a kid is on her back, she’ll take care of them, point blank.

So a couple weeks ago I was sicker than a dawg (wonder where that phrase comes from and sadly I’m still not over this crap. I’m done with it, but that’s another story for another day I guess), but I woke up and realized my mom was outside with the horses talking on the phone. I wasn’t real sure what was going on. She came in the house, said she thought Aloha had broken her leg and we were headed to the vet.

I jumped to, got the Bug and me dressed, carseat switched over to the truck, truck hooked up to the trailer, horse loaded, and away we went. We had to hustle because we were supposed to be there by 11, vet is about 45-50 minutes away and it was a quarter to 10 already.

We got loaded up, I said a quick prayer that dad’s truck wouldn’t let us down (it’s had problems from time to time), and away we went. I pulled into the vet clinic with 2 minutes to spare. Dad met us there, we unloaded Aloha, and the vet’s went to doing their thing.

First they did X-rays to see if the bone was broken. After they concluded that it wasn’t, they then pulled out the ultrasound to see what was going on inside. They concluded that it was either a pulled Tendon or Ligament. That’s a lot easier to deal with than a broken bone! Our 2 options

  1. Stall Rest, cold watering twice a day, bute twice a day (like Tylenol to help with pain), and hand walking
  2. Head to Peculiar, MO, to a huge horse facility up there and let them do further extensive studying on the leg to make it better.

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Kansas from Cedar Vale, Kansas

Does that title have you scratching your head? Well…. Meet Kansas….

Okay, I’ll explain. So a year ago we had 3 colts born… Blue Jeans, Flash, and Cadillac. All stud colts. All yearlings now. We have a lot of horses so this summer we decided to sell a couple off. We posted Flash and Blue Jeans up for sale just to see what would happen. Early in the summer we had a guy hit us up about a trade, horse for horse. We weren’t real sure we wanted another horse, we wanted to disperse some so we kind of said thanks but no thanks.

About a week ago or maybe 2 now though, we rethought that and hubby hit the kid up. I say kid because now we’ve met him and I think he’s probably 18… that’s a kid to me ;). Anyway…. we got some more info on the horse. He’s a 7 year old broke gelding who is just grade. Now grade means no papers. All of our horses are registered. Does that matter? Really only when you go to show maybe.

We kind of wondered why the kid wanted to swap a broke horse for an unbroke stud, but we didn’t question it too much. After some discussion, we decided to do the swap. We got a broke horse out of the deal and sometimes they’re easier to sell anyway if we were to decide to sell him.

Karen and Jared came over on Tuesday of that week to help us try to get a halter on Blue Jeans because he wasn’t broke… not one bit. Not even halter broke. It didn’t work in our favor.  Thursday night my dad went back out with us and we finally got a halter on the colt after a lot of trying. It wasn’t an easy feat but the minute we had the halter on him, his attitude changed. We had him leading in 20 minutes. It was crazy.

And our only real casualty was dad’s arm. Some how dad’s arm got struck by Blue Jean’s front leg. Ouch!

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Round and Round We Go

Last week was the Lamar Fair. I pretty much grew up there during high school and college. In fact, from the time I was 15, I think I only missed 1 until I was too old to show there. That’s not to bad I don’t think. And I have lots of good memories from there… like the time that I got into a water fight. I’ll have you know I didn’t start it.

Okay, so the water fights at the Lamar fair… At the end of every livestock portion of the fair, there was typically a water fight. The officials tried to stop it, but it never happened, so then they banned it from being under the tents (yup we were under tents at the time, now they’re under a pavilion). So as long as the water fight stayed outside the tents, it was fair game. 2 friends and I had left to go get lunch. When we got back, Chelsea and I made a deal that if one of us got wet, the other would join in on the fight.

I took off running like mad because we both had kids hot on our tail, I dove into someone’s sheep pens head first while she got soaked. So I walked out the front of the tent and said hit me, which caused me to get hit with 4 different buckets of water from all directions. But then, the hunt was on. What do I mean? Oh Chelsea and I were out to get all our fellow sheep participants involved in the water fight. By the end of the water fight, I’m pretty sure that most all sheep participants we showed with were soaked, including our official leader. He was a parent, but we didn’t take mercy.

Those are the kind of stories I want my kids to have. Fun ones. Even though it sucked being soaked in jeans and boots, it was a lot of fun and something I wouldn’t trade. Luckily for me, I brought dry clothes to go home in. Poor Lexie, a fellow competitor we got soaked, she did not, so she had to ride home pants less or so her mom told us.

Abug is too little to show yet, but when I heard the Lamar Fair was going on, I asked the hubs if we could go up one night. The one thing about the Lamar fair is that they have rides as well as the animal portion of the fair. We always start out in the livestock barns because, well, that’s where I grew up. It’s always funny to me to see the kids who were her age when I was showing, now being at that showing age. It’s CRAZY!

Case in point… This kid right here was like 2-4 years old the last year I could show. Now he’s 17 year’s old I think someone told me earlier this summer.

After yacking with my friend Casey and his dad Randy for a while down in the sheep barns, and Casey and hubby ganging up on me more than once (by the way, I have multiple stories on Casey… we’ve been friends way to long), we decided to head up to the carnival portion of the fair.

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