The Open House 2009..........Preparations

Once I had my entries done for nationals and sent off to Aurora to the Arabian Horse Association , it was time to shift gears to begin working on my annual open house. The first Sunday after Labor Day was fast approaching and I hadn't done a thing to get started on this event.

Waiting until the last minute is not a good thing for lots of reasons. The biggest is stress. There's lots to do and the less time I have to accomplish these tasks the more stress I feel. Waiting until the last minute also makes it more difficult to get my friends to help. This date is not grilled into their brains like it is mine so they forget and schedule other things even though they would really like to help out.

This year was a really bad one for that........and I had no one to blame but myself. Not talking to people until just two weeks before is pushing it. The result was I was scrambling to get enough workers for the actual event, let alone having help to get the horses detangled, show clipped and bathed first.

Because I'm taking horses to nationals, I didn't want to skip working them all together. Instead I worked those three horses in the early morning, then spent the rest of the day working on grooming projects getting ready for the open house. It made for some long long days.

With the thick manes and tails I have here, I spent a couple of days just fighting with witch's knots. I swear there are little gremlins living in some of those manes busily churning away with their eggbeaters as quickly as I can detangle. If it wasn't for Cowboy Magic, I'd never get the job done. But even at that, some of those manes are retangled with just a shake of the head before I can even get out of the stall. My rule of thumb is once untangled it has to be good until bath time or I'd never even make it to bath time if you know what I mean.

My daughter, Colleen, came out after her work day was through to help hold horses getting their ears clipped. Mostly we just started at the first barn and worked our way through. The only exceptions were those horses I expected to be naughty.......which, of course, would mean Rhet and probably this year's foal. Those horses we'd leave until the last. That way if we got bounced around we wouldn't be sore and still trying to finish clipping.

Colleen came to help on two separate nights and we got most of the herd done. Pretty much all of the horses were good with a couple of exceptions. Andy (2 year old colt) who I expected to be naughty was quite good and his pasture mate, Patriot (also a 2 year old colt) was very very naughty.

It was on the third night we took on the quarter horse/Arab cross foal now known as Doc. After my experience trying to worm this colt and little work in between I really didn't know what to expect. What I did know was we had little time to cram in a whole lot of training................

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