Foaling and Showing Rolled into One - The Story Begins

I think to avoid a mutiny of my blog readers I should probably post about the foaling and leave the issues about the show for another day. However, these stories are intertwined because they happened simultaneously. I was there for both events, hopping back and forth trying to be at the right place at the right time. It's really hard to separate them out from each other so I'm going to go with the flow and see what we get.

While I was posting about my secret, another drama was unfolding here. My pregnant mare, Scandalous Dare, was due to foal on April 26. However, she showed absolutely no signs of imminent foaling until April 21. Then the mare went from nary a symptom to nearly all of them overnight.




The watch was on immediately. Being a maiden mare meant she could be unpredictable. There were no guarantees that she would go by the book and get milk before her foal was born.

Watching the mare wasn't my only stress. The live webcam was having issues of it's own. That cam was the only assistance I had in watching this mare, it was important to resolve those issues if I was to get any sleep or make the horse show.

I can't even tell you how many crashes there were to this cam. Along with those we were picking up static interference beginning in early evening and lasting for hours sometimes even through the entire night. Each time we thought we'd found the source and fixed it, something else would happen. The end result was my chances to sleep were disappearing working on the cam.




By the time I'd posted Foaling and Showing Rolled into One I had probably had a total of 10 hours of sleep in a five day period.
I was running on empty and the mare was still pregnant.

We'd moved in at the horse show on Friday but in reality we were one day late. I had screwed up our schedule thinking we didn't show until Saturday. Angie and Richard realized Thursday night that Rachel actually had a class on Friday afternoon. Grandma had made a big mistake and we needed to hustle to get moved in and set-up in enough time for Rachel to school her horse at the lunch break and ride her class in the afternoon.

The only problem with this was by this time Dare's milk had come in. I needed to be home mare watching but I also needed to be hauling horses and all the stuff involving getting horses shown. I gave the idea of having Dave do the hauling a brief thought but rejected it knowing half the needed stuff would end up still left on the trailer back at home instead of down at the show. To get the job done right, I needed to do it myself.





I had the Mare Stare cam to rely on for eyes on the mare so I figured I could haul the horses and get stuff moved in, maybe watch Rachel's class, if I was lucky and then get my b*tt back home.

I went into the chat room and posted on the forum asking for eyes telling them I'd come back as soon as things were unloaded. I gave them phone numbers and told them not to be dissuaded if they saw Dave or Lindsay, neither knew enough to help if a mare got into trouble. If they thought the mare was going to foal to call me immediately.

Half way through the moving in process I got a phone call from my Arabian horse breeder friend, Bev. She'd been watching Dare and she really thought the mare was about to foal. It didn't take but that word from Bev for me to be tossing stuff out of my trailer onto the ground while giving instructions about what I needed done. I'll bet it took me all of five minutes to get on my way out of the fairgrounds and headed home.

I called Dave to see how the mare was doing. He said she was fine, just standing there. Then I got a call from Laurie from Mare Stare. She and I go back a ways and I respect her opinion as much as Bev's. If both these woman believed the mare was foaling that must be the case.

I did all I could to drive the speed limit going home. The last thing I needed was to get pulled over and spend a half hour getting written up. Over and over in my head I kept telling myself that Dare would wait for me, Dare would wait for me.......

It was a relief when I rounded to the corner to my farm. As I pulled into the yard, I saw Dave was putting horses out. It was late in the day for that and the horses were all in an uproar. If Dare had been in the first stage of labor, my guess was it had stopped. No way a mare's going to foal with this kind of upheaval going on around her.

I headed for the mare's stall and my suspicions were confirmed. Dare was frantic. I can't even tell you when I have ever seen her in such a state. If she had indeed been in labor, it was most definitely stopped. As upset at the mare had been I didn't know if she'd calm down enough to foal soon or maybe it might even take days. It was back to more watching on the computer.

To be continued.........

The Start of Day 2

I debated about posting the first two pics since they're not the most poetic with the foal still in the sack and the blood. But I found this first instant where Dare reached out to see what this new creature in her stall was so touching it out weighed the aesthetic issue. What do you think?

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