More Pony Pictures

Selfies with Abby are rarely successful, so I am always glad when someone snaps a few photos of us together.

 Like this one of the two of us looking at each other over the gate.

Or me holding Mila while the mares visit with us (and hope for treats.)

Add in some kids, and my day has been made. (I love how Mila has her butterfly net at the ready - you never know when a fly might flit past!)

Stepping Stones and Horseflies

I spent the morning with , Vanessa, Ian, Mila, and Lukas. We made concrete stepping stones for the garden - I make one for each grandchild the year they are born with either their handprint or footprint.

Vanessa adds Lukas' name and the date around the perimeter of his tiny footprint.

But when I am making one for a new grandbaby, usually his or her siblings want to make another one just for fun. As a result, I have close to thirty stepping stones now in my front flower bed!

And the grandchildren love to find "their" stones when they visit. (This is Ian from a year ago looking at his baby one.)

 Mila checks out hers in September, 2017.

We even make them for pets (Zeus was our black Lab) 

and last year when Kyle's family evacuated Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma's landfall, his kids wanted to make one to commemorate the storm!

After finishing up the two new stepping stones, we all headed out to the barn to feed carrots to Abby.

Grabbing the two child-sized butterfly nets I keep in the garage, Ian informed me that he and Mila would be looking for bugs out at the barn. Especially flies.

 While a pasture full of horses is usually a good place to fly-hunt,

today those flies were in short supply. 

 Abby and Lukas check each other out.

 Ian kept an eagle eye out for flies but no such luck.

He also demonstrated to his mother how to feed Abby a carrot, which helped distract him from the lack of flies.

Spending time with family AND horses? Life does not get much better!

Molly - Home at Last

Nine months after rescuing Molly, we saw great progress. She was calmer and liked to have one of us with her at all times, she wagged her tail at us and would take treats from our hands, and she enjoyed walks down by our neighborhood lake. But she still kept her distance from us and would not let us approach her and pet her if she was off leash. Molly just could not seem to help herself, shying away and then looking at us with some tentative tail wags when she felt there was a safe distance between us.

When Lisa came over, though, Molly was a different dog. She would be so happy to see Lisa, sitting next to her, licking her hands and face, following her around the house, and just showing how much she loved our daughter.

We finally decided to see if Molly would be happier living with Lisa (and Lisa happy living with Molly). So, Saturday, September 16, Lisa came over and got her.

We could not have made a better decision.

Look at that happy face.

Millie likes having Molly around, and will probably grow more dependent on her as Millie is nearly completely deaf and is getting older. Having a younger dog around should be helpful.

Molly follows Lisa everywhere in her new home, including to the bathroom where she patiently waits outside the door for Lisa to come out.

 And she has found her "spot" in Lisa's living room where she likes to sleep.

She's given Millie's bed a try...

 ... but Millie doesn't really seem to mind. (She sleeps on Lisa's bed most of the time anyway!)

There's a doggie door so that she can go in and out at will, plus a fenced in yard for her to run around in without being on a leash.

We still get to have Molly in our home a few times a week while Lisa is at work. She and Millie spend the day with us and then go home around 5:00. 

Molly settles quickly back into being in our home, flopping onto her favorite bed and snoozing as though she had never left. But, she still keeps her distance from us.

No doubt about it, we miss her (and I have cried many tears the past week), but our goal for Molly was always to have her be happy and feeling safe.

Goal accomplished.

Following

The horses are currently in the southeast paddock which is bordered by the lane leading up to the new barn.

That means they know I am there as soon as I swing my car into the lane and begin the drive up to the gate. See those heads popped up and looking my way? There's no sneaking up on them!

By the time I had parked and grabbed the carrots, the herd was waiting for me at the gate.

Abby always softly nickers at me as I approach; today was no different. I love that sweet sound.

A quick check showed that someone is still nibbling on her mane; in fact, her forelock is now gone, too.

 The herd dispersed when Abby finished her carrots and I headed back to my car.

 Abby was meandering to another spot in the pasture...

 ... when she looked up at me as I drove past.

 Suddenly, she began following my car as I drove down the lane.

 I was driving slowly so it was no problem for her to keep up,

 and when I stopped for a moment to make sure my camera was working right, she kept going.

 Suddenly she realized that I had stopped. To my great surprise...

... she turned around and came back.

 I was still in my car and had not called her to come.

But Abby is very people oriented; in fact, that is why I made the decision to buy her in 2012 when I really had not intended to buy a horse. She had followed me all over the round pen at Indiana Horse Rescue, and ended up standing next to me and leaning her hip against mine companionably. My heart melted, and I signed those papers to make her mine.

 She stood and watched me until I waved goodbye and resumed driving.

Sometimes I marvel at how lucky (and how blessed) I am to have this mare. There is much to be said for the joy a horse can bring, even if they are simply a pasture ornament.

Passing Notes in Church

About six months ago, a friend stopped by to visit, bringing her eight year old son. He was fascinated by my collection, and I ended up giving him a mini circus pony when he left.

These are HO Preiser Performing Horses in a scale of 1/87, and made by a company in Germany that creates items for railroad hobbyists. Smaller than Mini Whinnies, they have excellent detail and paint jobs for their size.

I'd forgotten about his visit and having given him one of the circus ponies. (He'd sent me a thank you note shortly after receiving the model.)  But my memory was jogged when I received this note after church services Sunday.

That's the third or fourth note that I have received from kids after church recently. All have been about horses, and some have had cute little drawings accompanying the note. (And how sweet that he invited me over to play games!)

Do you suppose my horseshoe earrings or necklace are giving me away? Or maybe it's my purse that has an embossed galloping horse on it? Whatever the reason, I love getting the notes and pictures, and I sure hope there are more of them in my future.

September 11 in the Classroom

September 11, 2001 was the very worst day of my life. I doubt that I am alone in that sentiment.

I spent the actual day itself in the classroom, horrified as I realized what was unfolding, realizing that it was a pivotal moment in history, but also very, very  reluctant to turn on the TV for my students to view that history. (Classrooms were just getting computers then but we did have TVs to show news stories, in-house announcements, etc.) Did I really want them to witness the graphic, live images being shown? I chose not to, a decision I have never regretted.

I spent September 11, 2001 with these children.

(Photo taken from yearbook.)

The tardy bell had just rung and the kids were unpacking their backpacks and going through their morning arrival routine. One of the boys came over and said, "Hey, Mrs. I, we heard on the radio as we drove to school that a plane hit one of the twin towers in New York City."

I thought it was a small, private aircraft and did not think too much about it aside from feeling sad that someone had probably just died, but I acknowledged his comment and started our school day.

A few minutes later, adult traffic in the hallway outside my classroom began to pick up with staff rushing back and forth, speaking in urgent murmurs and whispers to one another. I knew something was up, but it wasn't until another teacher popped in that I began to realize the scope of what was happening. He told me that a second plane had hit the other tower and then declared, "We're at war!"

I switched my computer on and began clicking on news stories. I felt sick at some of what I saw and read. Turning my computer screen away from the kids' view, I left the news site pulled up so that I could continue to monitor what was happening throughout the day.

My students knew that something was happening - how could they not with the activity out in the hallway and their teacher flustered and not herself? I realized that I was going to have to say something to them, but what?

Finally, I asked them to join me on the carpet for a conversation. As sensitively as I could, and without going into graphic detail, I told them that this day would be a day they always remembered as it was a pivotal day in our country's history (in the world's history, in fact.)  I explained that two planes had flown into the twin towers but that I preferred to let their parents tell them details about what had happened. I reassured them that they were safe at school and that we would continue our day as we always did. And then we got back into our usual routine - normalcy, as much as possible, is safe and reassuring in and of itself. But it was anything but a normal day.

In the seventeen years since, I have spent twelve of the September 11 anniversaries in the classroom (the five other times the date fell on a Saturday or Sunday.) No matter how much time has passed since the actual event, it is always a difficult day. I'm a teacher, and that day changed the world and was history. Should I discuss it and its impact on our world? Or do I again let the parents handle that, telling their children as much or as little as they wish them to know?

Usually I would take cues from the children and their needs - some years I quietly mentioned it and then moved on, other years the kids had questions and I was forced to go deeper. I dreaded talking about it and dredging up the sickness and pain I felt, the memories of the horrible scenes that I witnessed live and can never remove from my memory - they are seared into my brain and they are awful.

In 2016, one of my students brought me a gift from her visit to the September 11 Memorial.

It was a book, a true story about a pear tree that had been growing in the plaza by the towers and buried in rubble, but had survived. Heavily damaged, the tree was removed and taken to a nursery where it was nurtured for several years and then replanted as part of the memorial to those who lost their lives that terrible day.

She included a photo of herself next to the tree. I look at it and think back to the worst day of my life, and I feel a spark of hope at the evidence that life goes on and we have survived that horrific act of violence that took so many innocent lives in such a terrible way.

I will never forget that day, when all I wanted to do was go home, be with my family, and cry. Instead, I spent it with children while fully knowing that they would be growing up in a world that had changed and was far less innocent than it had been as they walked into school that morning.

"Children are our future," goes an old saying, but it's true. Those who spent the first September 11 with me are now all in their late twenties. Many are married and some are parents themselves, continuing the circle of life.

Indeed, life goes on. The towers have been rebuilt, but the scars, physically and emotionally, remain. Our world is different, changed.

But, I have hope. Hope that my students' generation will make our world a place of peace. I know those kids, twenty years of them, and year after year, there were many gems that came through my door, people who would grow up to do good things.

Yes, I have hope.

A Visit with Susan Bensema Young

Today was a fabulous hobby day - my friend, Susan Bensema Young, came for a visit. Sue and her husband George are at Penn State University, where George is a professor of Meteorology as well as Mining and Finance. Sue is the premier tackmaker in the model horse hobby.

We never ran out of things to talk about and could easily have spent another day together, we had so many things to share.

Sue was anxious to see my circus pony collection.

 Getting closer to see the mini circus ponies in better detail.

She'd never seen the Shiken ponies before - I found them on eBay simply by doing a search for "circus pony."

Sue is a very observant person, something that I am sure helps her be such a master tackmaker. Here she examines my favorite Breyer, the charcoal Semi-Rearing Mustang that I bought with my babysitting money ($5) in sixth grade.

After some time in my horse room, we headed back downstairs so that Sue could show me all the goodies that she had brought to share.

Like me, Sue collects Breyer's model horse blankets. 

 Sue brought some of her exquisite bridles for me to look at.

 And these snowshoes! Aren't they beautiful?

A miniature side saddle.

Despite the pouring rain from the remnants of Tropical Storm Gordon, we headed out to the barn to visit Abby and see Tim's tack and vehicle collection.

 Sue explained a lot of the harness pieces and their functions to me.

She really enjoyed the tour of Tim's vehicle collection.

I love this photo of the mares and Sue! 

After a quick lunch at Cafe Literato and the barn trip we headed back to the house to look through Sue's binders and chat some more.

She is a multitalented lady - she is also a pianist with a degree in music! Sue especially loves ragtime and played for me while I looked through her famous binders that document all the tack she has made over the years.

With sore throats from all the talking, we finally wrapped up at 6:00 PM. Sue and George had to head to Huntington where they had reservations for the night and a canoeing trip planned the next morning.

We may get together again soon - Sue is hosting a show in November and invited us to come for that. Or, she may come out for my show, Happy Trails, in June. Then there's always BreyerFest in July.

I am already looking forward to out next meet-up!