Yesterday I took a half day off of work so I could move Henry to his new babysitter barn. Best case scenario, he still has another week or two until he can go back into regular turnout, and he has to be on soft footing for a couple months, plus a few other short term high maintenance care issues that add up to a lot of supervision, so I essentially had to find somewhere that can babysit him 24/7 for a while.

I have to give a huge shoutout and many thanks to Equicare for taking such good care of Henry for the past 5 weeks.  He looks fantastic, is happy, and didn’t lose a stitch of conditioning despite his layoff. It was icing on the cake when I showed up yesterday to pick him up and they had cleaned my trailer, bathed him, and had all of his stuff cleaned up and ready to go. Great service means a lot, and they went above and beyond several times. They’re really great, everyone local to me should check them out.

Henry loaded, traveled, and unloaded well, except for all that screaming for his Equicare BFF Chico, the mini horse. Really Henny, of all the available equines to fall in love with, it was the mini?

He’s getting eased back into turnout slowly, so he went in the round pen yesterday afternoon. I really expected him to be a lunatic but he mostly just walked around and then tried to make friends with the mares over the fence.

I did make him trot a few laps for me so I could see him move, then left him alone to roll and hang out and stare off into the distance wide-eyed (he’s particularly good at that). Then I unloaded all of my stuff, which quickly took over the tack room. Sorry, everyone else. The sad part is, there’s a lot more at home and in my trailer, I just figured I’d start with the bare minimum.

He’s getting new shoes today, and then hopefully I can get on and see how he feels. It’s finally supposed to rain a little bit over the next week, which would be great. This barn has a HUUUUGE hilly (for Texas) hay field to ride in, and the soil is pretty sandy. If we could get some rain, it would be soft enough to ride out there. I’m beyond ready to get back into the swing of things, and I think Henry is too.