Month: May 2020

Since it’s Ollie’s first Foal Friday I figured I’d let him have the spotlight all to himself. Plus, let’s be honest, most of the pics coming out of WTW this week are of this kid, because it’s hard for anyone else to get attention when you’ve got a pony baby that’s THIS level of cute running around.

And when I say running around I do mean RUNNING. What is it with these pony foals, they’re born with firecrackers in their bums.

His pretty metallic silver color definitely adds to his charm, too. It’s a shame he’ll gray out, but maybe he’ll look even more silver in the process?

So far his personality is more like Oakley’s, who is by the same sire. He’s cheeky and bold and weird and contains large doses of sass and ponytude. It will be interesting to see how their dynamic unfolds when they get turned out together (my money is on the filly).

But he’s also REALLY well balanced already, and looks like he’s going to be a nice mover. He’s uphill and getting more and more suspension as he figures his legs out.

Also did I mention Ollie is really really cute and he knows it?

If your heart hasn’t exploded from cuteness yet, here’s the coup de grace:

Happy Friday everyone! It looks like Sadie is going to foal any time now… I’m watching her on the camera as we speak. Fingers crossed for an uneventful foaling to round out the WTW Class of 2020!

To be clear up front: I have in no way used this enough to give a full review yet, but I’ve had A TON of people asking me about it, so I thought I’d offer my first impressions. Especially since the US dealer doesn’t have a lot of stock left and isn’t sure when more will be coming.

At $280 the Brockamp Spezial bareback pad isn’t cheap, although I would call it mid-range compared to others like Christ and Stargazer, which are more in the $500-850 range. If you only ride bareback a few times a year, it would probably make sense to buy something cheaper like the Best Friends pad or the Thinline. Or if your bareback rides are short and/or mostly walking and your horse isn’t particularly sensitive… the cheaper ones are probably fine. But, ideally I’d like to ride bareback at least once a week, I do full flatwork and sometimes jump bareback, and I own the World’s Most Delicate Flower. My crotch and his withers both wanted more padding, and I wanted a pad that had enough structure to sit well up off of his TB withers and spine (the biggest problem I’ve seen with most bareback pads is spine pressure on the horse’s back – many of them bind due to their design. Which is also why you should NEVER buy a bareback pad with stirrups – there’s no internal structure to support that pressure so it all goes on the spine.).

The Brockamp comes in TONS of colors, and of course I wanted navy, which was sold out at the time, so I had to wait for the next shipment. These pads are made in Italy (the Italian suede is real nice, omg) and Brockamp is based out of Germany, so as you can imagine covid had an impact. But they did finally make it to the US distributor, who got it in the mail to me the next day.

Initial impression out of the box: it’s definitely beautiful. It’s finished well, the suede is luxe, and it has the structure I was looking for. It comes with a neoprene girth or you can use a short girth you already have. I had already fully intended to use my own girths that I know Henry likes, which was the reason why I wanted a pad with the english style girth straps in the first place. The next question was what, if anything, did I want to put underneath it?

There are a lot of options when it comes to padding underneath a bareback pad. Option 1, of course, is no padding. This is totally fine, and the under side of this pad is a no-slip neoprene so that you won’t have slippage issues. Another option would be just a square pad or baby pad, to minimize bulk but help keep the pad clean. If you have a particularly wide horse who has issues with slippage from side to side, many people opt to use a treeless saddle pad underneath to provide even more structure, more like the panel of a saddle. I knew that I wanted to put something underneath, since Henry’s super sensitive skin has already told me that it prefers the sheepskin/merino wool life, but I didn’t think I needed to go as far as a treeless saddle pad. Enter – Presto’s Mattes half pad.

The Mattes sits damn near perfectly under the Brockamp, gives the pad a layer of protection from sweat and dirt, provides Henry’s princess skin with protection from the pad, and gives a little bit more padding along his topline, too. Of course it does create a slightly wider feel under my seat, which is ok for my horse but might be annoying on particularly wide ones.

But, most importantly – what’s it like to ride in?

Grippy. And squishy. Not overly so – I can still move around up there, and I still definitely have to use my core to keep my balance, but it’s for sure not slipping around and was more secure for me when Henry inevitably spooked (at a tree, as one does). I first I was concerned it might be TOO much padding or TOO much bulk, but I could still very easily feel Henry’s back through the pad. As you can see there is less padding underneath your seat and leg compared to the front/back, so it gives you a nice place to sit and still be in close communication with the horse. What made me happiest was feeling the difference in Henry’s trot using this pad vs when I had just been using a regular sheepskin pad or half pad for bareback rides. He was obviously more comfortable, with no hesitance to really swing through his topline. For as much as I don’t like having his withers in my crotch, horses don’t always love having our seat bones in their backs either.

The only slightly nitpicky things I can say about it so far are 1) I don’t love the underside. Then again, y’all know I don’t like neoprene much in general. I do like that it’s anti-slip, though, and I think that’s almost necessary with a bareback pad. In my dream world I would love if they made a version that was half-lined with sheepskin or something and the rest was non-slip. Granted I also realize that a lot of people use these with treeless saddle pads underneath, which makes this lining much more ideal to fully grip the other pad. My Mattes pad makes it all a non-issue, but just a rambling thought. 2) when I first pulled it out of the box I thought it might be a little TOO structured. It was rigid, and sat kind of stiffly on the horse – until I rode in it. Then, ta-da, it molded to the shape of the horse and sat really nicely. So don’t be scared if it looks a little bit like bat wings at first. It’s also worth noting that the company churns these out in fairly limited quantities, so you can’t always just go online and buy whatever color you want at any time. The stock tends to go in waves as more are distributed and it can be months before they put any more out. It makes them fairly high demand, especially in certain colors. If you’re tied to a particular color, be prepared to wait.

So far, though, the Brockamp is really hitting the main points in what I was looking for in a bareback pad. I was hesitant to spend this much, but in retrospect I’m glad I opted for the one that had everything I wanted rather than just trying to be cheap. The structure and spine clearance is great, it works with my existing girths, its comfortable for both horse and rider, it’s pretty, and it doesn’t shift or slip. Because it fits all my criteria, I know I’ll actually use it. I’m excited to get more miles on it summer and see how it holds up and how my opinion continues to evolve. I plan on posting a full review sometime in the fall, but I hope this helps give a little insight for now!

So, Presto got demoted from a part-time barn horse to a full-time outside horse. He had been an outside horse when we moved out here initially, living out in the pasture with his 2yo friend. But when the other horses left for Florida for the winter and it was just me here with the remaining 4, it was easier and gave me more peace of mind to just have all of them come into the barn at night. I could easily see them on cameras, I knew they were under shelter if the weather was bad, it’s warmer in there, they were more settled in the group, they each had their own space to eat and snooze, etc. The Florida horses are coming back this weekend so he was about to get moved back out to his full time pasture life again anyway, but he got booted a week early. Why, you ask? OH I’LL TELL YOU WHY.

He figured out how to open his stall door, and the results are just as bad as you might imagine. I came out to feed on Sunday morning and it looked like an actual tornado had gone through the barn. Henry and Presto were both loose. Presto’s stall door was open, Henry’s stall door was open, and the hay room door was open. Boards had been ripped off the front of every single stall. He ate every scrap of afalfa that was in there, which luckily wasn’t very much. He tossed the opened coastal bale all over the place. He ate and pulled down part of one of the shade bushes. He broke a broom and a manure fork and the board that’s used to separate the aisle by the stallion’s stall when he’s here. He knocked EVERYTHING down. Every halter, every blanket, anything and everything that was knock-down-able. He even managed to undo a couple snaps in the process.

From the amount of poop in their stalls and runs I could see that Presto had to have been out for a while, but Henry can’t have been out for very long at all. Also, Henry is a jerk and would never let other horses out or destroy things that weren’t food motivated – totally not his style. He got out one night before and just ate grass in the courtyard. No, this one had Presto written all over it from top to bottom. Why he chose to let Henry out, I’m not sure, because when I happened upon the scene Henry had chased him into a corner and was about to kick the daylights out of him. Releasing Henry was a dumb move. It looked like he had tried to release Quinnie too… her stall has an extra clip on it because she has a history of opening her own door, and he succeeded on removing the clip but didn’t actually finish opening the latch. The only stall with no evidence of attempted breach was his 2yo friend’s. Which, thank god. I can’t imagine the damage if both of THOSE idiots had been out. JB has a history of barn destruction himself.

So that’s the end of that shit. I had already given him a second chance when he pulled down a couple boards in his own stall a few weeks ago. That appeared to have been a one time incident, but no. He certainly hadn’t forgotten, he was just waiting to repeat it on a much larger scale.

You should have seen the complete and utter heartbreak and confusion on his face Sunday night when he didn’t get to come in. Henry and Quinnie came into the barn as usual, and I brought Presto and JB’s feed out to their shed so they could eat. They thought that was odd, but ok. After they ate they both went to the gate like “ok let’s go in now”. And I just laughed at them from the porch as they stared forlornly toward the barn. JB wandered away after a few minutes, but Presto stood there for quite a while.

On Monday I went out to lunge him real quick to try a different bit on him (this bit saga is becoming long already) and he was absolutely exhausted. Clearly he didn’t get his usual 3 hour dead-to-the-world nap that he usually takes after night check, because it took all of my effort just to get him to trot for a few laps each way. If I stopped clucking, he stopped moving. Poor kid. The life of a delinquent is tough. Maybe you should have been more appreciative of your private nap time before you destroyed the barn.

So I’ll be spending the weekend fixing the rest of the Prestnado damage. What a turd. Y’all pray for their shed, I’m worried that it’ll be the next victim. JB already pulled down some of the ceiling insulation a while back…

Remember how, back when everyone was trying to decide whether or not they’d keep riding with all the covid stuff going on, I jokingly said something like “pretty sure I’m more likely to end up in the hospital from something stupid around the barn than from falling off a horse.”.

Yeah so that’s exactly what happened. Except it was urgent care, not a hospital. I was pretty close on that particular prophecy.

It was last Thursday. I had JUST gotten off of Henry. We did the TP challenge, where we may or may not have jumped bareback over the mounting block with me holding 2 rolls of toilet paper. THAT went just fine. I had ridden back up to the barn, dismounted, and led Henry up to the tack room while I stepped up inside to grab him a cookie.

He took a few steps into Presto’s stall so I turned around quickly to grab him, but missed the step and… fell out of the tack room. Like hard. Backwards/sideways. Like a fuckin Kesha song, I went TIMBEERRR.

I don’t even remember exactly how the hell it happened, I just remember one second I was in the tack room turning around and the next second I was hitting the ground like a ton of bricks. I landed mostly on my hip but my head bounced off the ground a couple times. As soon as I tried to stand up my vision got all wonky, everything went VERY BRIGHT, like when your phone camera goes from shade to sunlight and the view is overexposed for a few seconds before it adjusts. It was like that for a couple minutes.

Icouldn’t put weight on my right leg, so I went back down again and decided to just sit still for a few minutes waiting for it to pass. I finally stumbled to my feet and pulled all the tack off Henry (literally, I unbuckled things and it all just fell to the ground where he was standing and that’s where it stayed) and shoved him back in his pasture, then went in the house. LUCKILY I had still been wearing my helmet when I fell, and when I took it off I saw that it was broken.

I could put weight on my leg by then but it HURT, like a lot, and while my vision had returned to normal quickly, my head still felt a little bit fuzzy. I was pretty certain I’d given myself a minor concussion. I waited a little while to see if the hip pain would pass, and somehow managed to take a quick shower (an odd choice, I admit, but I was hot) and I got pretty concerned about my leg. I tried getting ahold of SO but unbeknownst to me he was out on a bike ride, so I messaged Hillary and Karen, and they voted I should go to urgent care. Since I bonked my head I shouldn’t drive, so Hillary came and picked me up and off we went.

It took me until yesterday to realize this, but I’m relatively certain that the urgent care staff totally thought we were a couple of bored dumb girls trying to get painkillers. There was NO ONE in the urgent care except us, and I was still a little weird from the bonk on the head. The APN that saw me asked my story, seemed skeptical, asked me a few questions “what’s your name?” “what’s your birthday?” “do you know you the president is?” (my answer to the last one was “unfortunately”, which I seemed to find a lot funnier than she did). She moved her fingers around and asked me to follow them with my eyes. Most of those tests felt normal but when she moved it quickly from left to right I could feel my eyeballs jumping around a little as if they were twitching. She asked me again about my timeline of events, and when I said it happened around 11 she pointed out that it was now 2pm. Right. Like I said… I laid there a while, then had to take care of the horse, then went inside and sat down for a while, then had to wait for Hillary to come, then had to drive to town, etc. She just kind of squinted at me. But she declared me to be fine, asked me again how it happened, seeming even more skeptical, and then asked if anything else was wrong.

I said yeah actually like I said I’m more worried about my hip, I just need to make sure I didn’t do any real damage because I can barely put any weight on it. I take care of horses and a farm so if I actually hurt it I need to know, so I can make care arrangements. She had me push my foot against her hand, and I was able to put a little bit of pressure on her hand. She inspected my hip for about half a second and said “well there’s no bruise”. No shit Sherlock, I too have eyeballs. It was hot and swollen but she didn’t seem to care about that. They also asked me how often I go to urgent care or ER’s, which I thought was a weird AF question.

She said she wanted to do a pregnancy test for some reason??? This made no sense to me at all, but I didn’t think much of it at the time. She also said that she wanted to xray my neck, just to make sure there was no damage. My neck felt fine, but ok. Since we were going to do an xray anyway I asked if we could do my hip as well, because again that’s what I was more worried about and she’d hardly given it any mind. She was like “I mean if that will make you feel better I can order a hip xray”. Um. Ok. Thanks?

So I peed in a cup, which I asked the techs about because it didn’t make sense to me. I knew I wasn’t pregnant and I didn’t understand how that could possibly have any relevance to my issues. One tech said “oh well that’s just standard procedure if we’re going to xray someone”. I didn’t question it further because I was like ok hip xray, sure, but I thought it was weird that she mentioned the pee test well before she ever mentioned any xrays, and she hadn’t even intended on doing the hip xray until asked.

Luckily nothing was broken, so they sent me on my way with a stack of paperwork and a prescription for an anti-nausea medication. The paperwork said that I had a mild concussion, hip contusion, and bruised kidney (oh hey there was blood in my pee. The lady that saw me didn’t mention the kidney part to me AT ALL, I just read it in the paperwork). Meanwhile I could still barely put weight on my right leg. For the first few days afterward I tried to stay away from devices to help my brain heal, so I retreated to a dark room a lot. SO came and helped me clean stalls, and I could hobble around well enough to feed horses. My head felt better really quickly. My hip still REALLY hurt though, as if someone had peeled back the top layer of skin, burned all the tissue underneath, and then put the skin back. Even a light touch was excruciating, and the burning feeling was constant. I definitely COULD NOT SLEEP because it was so uncomfortable to lay down. It hurt more than my actual broken bones have.

Last night after day 4 of no improvement with my hip I finally talked to Michelle’s husband, who is an ER doc that owns some urgent cares up where they live. He was more helpful in 5 minutes on the phone than the other urgent care place had been. He asked me questions they hadn’t, more specifics about the pain, outlined a treatment protocol, and told me what to do next. We are all relatively appalled by the first urgent care and how dismissive they were.

After talking to him it FINALLY occurred to me… I’m pretty sure the lady who saw me thought I was just trying to get painkillers. Once I looked back on the whole experience from that point of view, it all made sense. Her questions, her attitude, the piss test, the fact that she didn’t seem to believe my story or give two shits about my hip pain. Once we laid it all out that way, we all agreed – that’s the only thing that makes sense.

So that’s relatively humiliating. And offensive. Especially to me, someone who has never done drugs of any kind. I don’t even drink CAFFEINE for god’s sake, and have maybe 4 alcoholic beverages a year. This is the first time I’ve been to an urgent care in my entire adult life, despite several actual broken bones. I was genuinely messed the eff up and she dismissed me completely. I mean, I get it, I’m sure they deal with people coming in with dumb stories trying to get pills and she doesn’t know me from Adam, but… it doesn’t make me feel any less shitty about how I was treated. The fact that it took me 4 days to even put all the pieces together should tell you how naive I am about all that.

That aside, my head feels pretty much back to normal today. And after following what Michelle’s husband told me to do last night, I’m finally seeing some improvement in my hip this morning. It feels like I did some soft tissue damage in there, but hopefully nothing too severe. I’m encouraged by the improvement since yesterday with some actual treatment.

Thank goodness I still had my helmet on. That was definitely lucky. I was kind of hoping I’d never actually test the MIPS system of the Traumavoid, but here we are. This helmet is definitely toast now, but considering the damage to it vs the damage to my head, it definitely did it’s job. Kind of makes me stop and rethink whether or not I should be wearing it more, in the barn…

Stormie finally released her hostage yesterday, and with that we’ve got a new sportpony colt at Willow Tree Warmbloods. Say hello to Ollivander WTW!

This is Usandro’s second US-born foal, the first being Oakley at the end of March, and Stormie’s second sportpony foal. Those who remember Nunez from last year might be seeing some similarities… apparently Stormie really likes to throw her pretty, petite head. I think Ollie’s ears are bigger though.

As you can see, Michelle finally got her grulla, although it looks like Ollie will turn gray… the hyperpigmentation/adult coat color are strong indicators. For now though he’s a really beautiful metallic silver color in the sun, with very obvious dun leg bars, ear caps, and dorsal stripe. I bet he will look beautiful as he grays out at least!

Stormie and baby are doing well so far, although Stormie was pretty tired after foaling yesterday. I can see why – Ollie is a big dude for a pony foal, and pretty well-developed for a newborn. He was definitely out of space in there and will take some time to unsquish all the way.

He’s a sweet colt that was super interested in people right from the start. Very friendly and curious. He also looks as though he will provide us with plenty of Foal Friday entertainment in the weeks to come.

So with the arrival of WTW baby #3 that means we only have one mare left to foal – Sadie, with a Presto half sibling. She’s already passed what is considered the full term mark of 320 days but is still a ways away from the average gestation “due date” of 340 days. She looks quite huge and miserable already so we’re all thinking she might go a little bit earlier than 340, but we’ll see! Sadie definitely does things Sadie’s way.

Happy Monday!