Well, I had a couple more posts drafted for last week, but after what happened with Gemma it just kinda… didn’t feel right. It was a somber week here, and to be honest I just wasn’t feeling it with carrying on here as if what happened with her was just a “blip”. Because it certainly wasn’t, not by a long shot.

The thing about having horses though, and living on a farm, is that life keeps on trucking along and the world keeps on turning whether you want it to or not. Other horses still have to be ridden and fed and cleaned up after. There’s still work to do. So you carry on, not because you aren’t devastated by what’s happened, but because you have no choice but to keep going. And the thing about horses is that while they can drop us to the lowest of lows, they also take us to the highest of highs. They wound, but they also heal.

So I took a few days to kind of retreat from “public” things a bit, like the blog and social media, and just spend some quiet time with the horses. At the same time I was getting ready for a show with Presto and let me tell you, it’s a weird thing to reconcile in your brain, being deeply sad but really excited at the same time. At least for me… admittedly I’m not the best with understanding or expressing emotions.

We also had the first WTW foal of the season born last week. And again – it was so exciting to meet the new baby, but also had a tinge of sadness because it also reminded me of the breeding plans we’d started to make for Gemma. There are lots of little kicks in the gut like that, from seeing her name on her grain bucket to putting away her blankets to having her cute face pop up on my facebook memories. It sucks, and it’s going to be like this for a while I imagine. I sure did love that silly little mare. At some point Hillary and I will start to keep an eye out for another nice mare, and if something super special comes along then so be it, but we won’t be going out of our way to look for one.

In less depressing news, tomorrow we’ll get to the horse show recap and then of course a new baby means that this week marks the return of FOAL FRIDAYS! That is probably the best news we’ve had in a while. This little one is super cute, too, y’all are in for a treat (pssst Patrons, check your dashboard for a preview). In the meantime here’s a quick catch-up on what else has happened in the past couple weeks.

The week before last, Presto went to another Wednesday afternoon jumper show to do the 1m class. He is quite unfazed by this height now and is legit just loping casually over things. We did learn at this show that the chin strap on my bit did not want to stay hooked (it came undone at fence 2 and flapped around the whole rest of the time, so that was cool), which was definitely good to know BEFORE that happened at a real horse show. I swapped the hook for a clip – problem solved.

Hillary and Lex moved up to Novice, bossing it around Rocking Horse like a couple of little baddies.

Henry ponied Nunez (who also got body clipped) and it was pretty freakin cute.

Nunez also went on his first XC school, with Sarah in the irons. That too was pretty freakin cute. He popped around all the Starter like a little champion.

I think that catches us up on the bigger events… that I can remember anyway. Life feels like a blur at the moment.