Insert some EDM and cue the lights because IT IS TIME for the best part of the entire year – foaling season!

This year we’ve got seven, yes SEVEN, foals due at Willow Tree Warmbloods. The biggest foal crop ever, and extra exciting with two sets of full siblings coming via embryo transfer. It will be fun to see how they compare.

First and foremost lets get to the good stuff: prizes. This year we decided to make it easy and offer a $100 e-gift card to the winner, and you can choose whether you would like for it to be from Corro or Riding Warehouse. Yup, somebody will get a hundred bucks just for guessing the stats on some cute baby horses.

We’ll do the rules just like always. All you have to do is exercise those psychic powers and comment here with your guesses for the following, for each foal:

• Foaling Date
• Foaling Time (doesn’t have to be to the minute accurate, just to the hour is fine – ie 2AM. If it happens anytime in the 2AM hour, you get the points.)
• Gender
• Color
• Face Markings (star, stripe, star/snip, none, etc)
• Leg Markings (again doesn’t really have to be as specific as sock vs stocking or whatever – “one sock”, “none”, “four socks”, etc will work. I’m looking for how many.)

So your submission should look something like this for each mare (feel free to copy my format to make it easier):

1. Peyton: 3/30 7AM bay colt, star, two socks
2. Daisy: 3/25 8AM bay dun colt, star, one sock
3. ChanelSurrogate: 4/22 12AM bay filly, stripe, two socks
4. Chanel: 5/1 10PM chestnut colt, blaze, four socks
5. Stormie: 5/11 6AM grulla filly, stripe, one sock
6. LissaSurrogate1: 5/12 5AM bay filly with a star and no socks
7. LissaSurrogate2: 6/1 7AM bay colt with a star/snip and two socks

But filled in with your actual guesses, of course. Everything you guess correctly will earn points. 10 points each for foaling date and time, and then 5 points each for gender, color, face markings, and leg markings… each foal can potentially net you up to 40 points. So even if you get a few things wrong, there are still ways to rack up the points you need to win. If there are any ties, I’ll put them all in a hat and get Michelle to pick a winner.

Submit your entries via a comment here on this post or you can message them to me on the blog’s facebook page. Just PLEASE make sure you leave a link or an email address or your full name in your comment so I can contact you if you win.

The “Due dates” I’ve listed are based on the average 340 days gestation, but keep in mind that average gestation can be anywhere from 320ish to 360ish. I’ve included pictures of both parents and whatever info is important so you can make your best guesses.

Peyton x Leprince des Bois

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Last year was Peyton’s first foal and she went at 344 days gestation but if we’re working off of the average of 340 days then that would be 3/28. As far as color genetics, both parents are obviously fairly plain bay, but they also both carry the red gene (and we know that Peyton produced a chromey chestnut last year from a fairly plain bay stallion). For those who want to get really specific, Peyton’s genetic color panel is Aa/Ee (psssst… here’s a foal color calculator if you want to look at the % chances for each color with each pairing) and she carries a W20 gene for white markings which may or may not get passed on.

Daisy x Usandro Tilia Derlenn

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Last year Daisy foaled at 328 days, but 340 days would put her “due date” at 4/4. The color possibilities with this one are a little more fun – Daisy is a grulla with a color panel of aa/Ee D/D. Usandro is bay/brown and EE. The only options are bay dun or grulla since Daisy is homozygous dun and Usandro can only produce a bay or black base coat.

ChanelSurrogate x Faustino de Tili

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We don’t know the foaling history of the mare (Lark) that’s carrying the first Chanel x Frosty foal, so that’s anybody’s guess. 340 days would be 4/19. Chanel’s color panel is AA/ee and she has two copies of W20, which can sometimes express as more white markings (but obviously not always). Frosty is gray and we think he was born bay. He does have a red gene since his dam was red. Since gray is at play here I’m looking for guesses about the base color only (bay or chestnut).

Chanel x Faustino de Tili

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Chanel has had a couple foals in Europe (foal one looks like this, foal two looks like this) but we don’t know any specifics about her foaling history so again it’s anybody’s guess. 340 days would be 5/4. Since this one is a full sibling to the above foal, all the other info is the same. Will they look alike?

Stormie x Usandro Tilia Derlenn

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Stormie’s 340 days is 5/16, although with her last two foals she went a few days early. Stormie was originally grulla and turned gray, with a color panel of aa/Ee/Gg/Dd. Usandro is bay/brown and EE. Again since gray is at play here I’m looking for guesses about the base color only.

Lissa Surrogate One x Utrillo vd Heffinck

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We don’t know the foaling history of the mare (Ginger) that’s carrying the first Lissa x Utrillo foal, so that’s anybody’s guess. 340 days for her would be 5/20. Lissa’s color panel is AA/Ee. Utrillo obviously is gray and we think he was born bay. Since gray is at play here I’m looking for guesses about the base color only.

Lissa Surrogate Two x Utrillo vd Heffinck

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Pretty much exactly the same story as above except the surrogate’s name is Blazen and her 340 days would be 6/11.

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I’ll leave entries open through 3/15, so that gives you 2 weeks to get your guesses in! The contest winner will be calculated and announced after the last foal is born. Obviously I have no idea exactly when that’ll be, hopefully early June, so you’ll just have to stay tuned!

Man… how are we back at Monday already? That did not feel like a particularly restful weekend, mostly because I was riding an emotional rollercoaster following along (ok, and weighing in sometimes) with all the discussion about this new MER rule, and the revision, and then the arguments about the revision, and then more details about how this all came about in the first place. Frustrated, disappointed, resigned, irritated, discouraged, disconnected, discarded… a lot of dis-.

I mean it makes sense that a lot of us are so emotional about this, because the potential implications are huge and we all feel passionate about the sport we love. To many of us outside of the east coast it looks like a Mt Everest that has been plopped directly in our path. Anyway, I read a lot of great things and I read a lot of extremely disappointing things, but I filled out the survey at least so… I guess we’ll see how the dominoes fall. All I know for sure is that if I see one more east coast pro rider say “ThAt’S wHaT mOdIfiEd iS fOr” I’m going to have an aneurysm. The Modified division pretty much does not exist outside of the east coast so that’s a useless statement. I’d have to drive 14 hours each way to get to the closest available one. Welcome to one of the challenges of not living in area 2 or 3. Want to help make the T to P move-up safer? Instead of making us burn up our horses with endless travel and a million T runs, organize a push to help make Modified available in every area. I’m also still not over the one saying that maybe if people want to event at Prelim or above we need to move.

ANYWAY.

In between being angsty at people on the internet, I did actually get a few things accomplished. The jumps that SO ordered for me (because he set fences for me once and hated my old semi-ghetto jumps so much that he literally went home and ordered me a couple new ones) finally came last week, although they required some assembly. Ok “some” isn’t accurate, they required all the assembly. Basically it just came as four PVC 4 x 4’s, 16 PVC feet, 8 tracks, 4 caps, and a baggie of screws. I kind of expected them to at least be pre-drilled, but no, it was all just cut to size. So, we built them ourselves. I guess I’m not really sure what I expected to show up, I never even thought about how they would ship standards (or not) but I was surprised that literally nothing was put together or pre-drilled. It gave the SO something to do though and made him feel like he accomplished something, which he did, since now I have 4 new standards. Now I can have more than one oxer! Exciting times indeed.

After spending so much time watching Ingrid and Piggy to cavaletti exercises lately I keep jonesing for those super cool square cavaletti ends that they use. They seem so useful, and so easy, and so stable. They’re also so expensive though. I saw a British company that’s coming out with some made out of a hard foam rubber type material and they look interesting. Still not particularly cheap, like 2/3 the price of the plastic ones, but it’s an interesting idea.

Kind of makes me wonder if I could find 12 x 12 x 4 blocks of the stuff and make a hole in it myself. I haven’t really started the hunt yet but it’s on my list.

Otherwise I spent the weekend checking some things off my list that have just kept getting pushed off. I finished the breeding info sheet for the Red Hills 4*, made Presto’s next vlog for the US Event Horse Futurity (will these vlogs ever take me less than like 6 hours to put together?), got the Baby Bets Contest post drafted and ready to roll (IT’S THAT TIME!), and organized more stuff that I want to sell. I’m more motivated to actually put in the effort to sell things now that I’m trying to pull more money together to keep Presto in training.

Aside from all that I also rode Henry plenty (I can’t tell if he loathes or loves being the center of attention once again… maybe both) and spent some quality time with my new spin bike. So far in the 5 days I’ve had it I’ve done 4 spin classes. It’s fun, in a really painful I-think-I-can-taste-my-own-lungs kind of way.

This week I’ve got a lot of meetings at work and I’m taking Thursday off so I can go up and visit Presto. The next item I need to start thinking about knocking off my list is the blog rebranding, which admittedly I’ve had precisely zero motivation for. It’s a lot of work, and it’s not even fun.

Hope everyone had a good weekend, and eventers if you haven’t filled out the survey about the new MER rule proposals yet, no matter how you feel about it, please please please please do so! This will probably be our only real chance to weigh in and it’s only fair that we all give our opinion.

So, the day that I finally decided to send Presto off for training, I may or may not have possibly sort of perhaps freaked out and bought a spin bike.

It’s not anything fancy like a Peloton, I definitely don’t roll that deep, it’s just a very basic no frills Amazon special that no one would ever fawn over but it gets the job done. It finally showed up on Wednesday and honestly since it had been 3 weeks since I ordered it (one and a half of which was the winter storm subreality from hell) I had forgotten about it. Surprise! It was pretty easy to put together at least, and she’s got a really nice spot on my back porch where I can look out at something besides a wall and get a nice breeze.

When I was going to the gym all the time, spin was my absolute favorite thing. Well ok, tied with swimming. It’s a lot harder to have a pool at home though. Spin was the only actual class I would take though, being an anti-social crowd hater and introvert… I have to REALLY love something to do it in public at all. And I don’t know why but there’s something about swinging a leg over a bike that makes me really “ride or die” (this was true when I competed in triathlons too) and suddenly I become competitive AF. Mostly with myself. I used to prefer sitting right in front of the class instructor so I could force myself to match them as exactly as I could. I am not like this at all with running, or yoga, or… most other things in the world. I have a lot of quit in me when it comes to those things. But on a bike I’ll go until the bitter end and push myself past my limit with little to no prompting.

I’d kind of forgotten that aspect of myself, until I did my first class and swore I could taste my lungs. Now, I’ll admit that I’m also too cheap to get any kind of app. And I don’t own an iPad or anything, so I just set my little phone on the bike to do classes. I’m not really into paying for it, so I found a few youtube channels with instructors I like and added a bunch of their classes to a list for myself, and just play the videos on my phone. So far I’m plenty pleased with that. I don’t really need the competitive nature of being in a virtual class with others, since I’m seemingly perfectly happy to try to kill myself on my own. Anyway, all of this to say that I’ve kind of gotten sucked into a youtube rabbit hole lately, and this is only one of the ways. Aside from the spin classes, most of it has been for horse-related content.

I posted Piggy March’s youtube channel a couple weeks ago and it remains a fun one for me. I like how she talks through the exercises she does and explains what she’s trying to get out of it, or how she troubleshoots.

I’ve also branched off into a couple other people’s youtube channels, especially Courtney Cooper and Cathy Wieschhoff. There are some useful tidbits in there, no matter what discipline you do. I love educational things like this, and seeing different people’s perspective on things. Never know what new things you might pick up!

For non-youtube stuff, there have a been a couple interesting things posted lately. For those who missed the first USEF Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion meeting and discussion you can replay it here on USEF Network. They covered a lot of great topics and I learned a lot. Definitely worth the watch. I think you do need a fan membership to watch USEF Network, so if you don’t already have one you can get a free one for the year with code SCOTTSDALE21. You’ll want it anyway before the LRK3DE coverage starts!

One other interesting one – USEA has been posting more educational videos, especially around the YEH and FEH programs. These programs and how they’re judged can be super confusing to outsiders or those that are new to it, especially because YEH is judged differently from regular horse trials, but unless you’ve attended judging symposiums you might not know quite what they’re looking for. The one most recently posted is about judging gaits, which is interesting not just from a YEH or young horse perspective, but from a general dressage perspective as well. You can hear a lot of the discussion about what scores they would give each horse for each gait and why. Definitely interesting!

Have you seen any good educational videos lately that are worth a share? Drop them in the comments!

I dunno about y’all, but my social media is ablaze with people debating the latest extraordinary rule changes put forth by USEA. If you haven’t seen them you can read about them or watch the video discussion.

There are some big ones put forth here, most having to do with safety. Like the 5 or more rails equals compulsory retirement at Training level and above. I’ve already talked about that one. I still feel the same way I did when I first heard it.

There’s one not listed on the website though that was discussed in the video – raising the number of required MER’s from 4 to 10 (or fewer depending on the rider’s classification… which, rider classifications at the national level would also be new. FEI does something similar, so it’s not a completely new idea). Most “normal” folks or non-upper level riders would fall into the unlicensed category, and that would mean 10 MER’s. If you aren’t aware, an MER is:

When achieved at a National Horse Trials an MER is achieved by completing the entire Horse Trial and scoring. – not more than 50 penalty points in the Dressage Test; and – No jumping penalties at obstacles on the Cross Country Test unless specified otherwise, and not more than 90 seconds (36 penalty points) exceeding the optimum time; and – not more than 16 penalties at obstacles in the Jumping Test. – 25 penalty points received for Dangerous Riding will not achieve a National Qualifying result. Exceptions to the qualifications noted below may only be approved by the Credentials/Grading Committee.

So basically you have to have 10 runs with a dressage test under 50, a clear XC, and no more than 4 rails in stadium (which, you’d be eliminated anyway if you had more than 4…). I was and still am very much in favor of raising the number of required MER’s. I thought 4 was definitely not enough. But is 10 too many?

This is a tough one for me. When you’re on a budget and/or have to travel a long way to get to an event, 10 MER’s could easily be two years or more. Granted, that was exactly my own trajectory – 2 years at Training before moving up to Prelim. However, I did NOT have 10 MER’s after those 2 years. I had 6. If you counted unrecognized (which here are at least run over the exact same courses that the recognized shows do, and timed) I would have had 10. Of course USEA doesn’t count those, so they wouldn’t have gone toward the total. I would have had to do a 3rd season at Training before we could have moved up. But then taking three years would not meet the “within 24 months” part of the requirements. Endless loop.

Is it the end of the world if people can’t move up the levels? No. Is it adding to the expense of an already expensive sport? For sure. If this was in place when I was moving up would I have tried to run my horse more often than was really ideal for him? I don’t know. Or would I have ended up diverting my money away from unrecognized shows, extra jumper shows, etc? Possible. Would any of that have been for our overall betterment? Probably not. Or maybe I never would have even tried for Prelim at all, my interest waning and turning to something else instead. Hard to say what you would have done or what would have happened in different circumstances.

If you’re on the east coast, where you can pop into a recognized show for the day, spend less than $300, and get your choice pretty much any weekend, it wouldn’t be as difficult or as expensive. But in the rest of the country, where it’s a 4-day endeavor (or more) to show, there’s maybe one a month, and it costs 3 times what a one-day would… 10 MER’s is massive. I have to admit that when I was thinking “more MER’s” I was thinking 6 or 7. Also, what if for all 10 of those MER’s you’re BARELY meeting the requirements? Does hitting the magic number 10 automatically mean you’re safer?

You can also use Modified as part of your MER’s, which would be great except we have NO MODIFIED divisions offered down here. None. At all. That’s not an option for us unless we drive to the East Coast. Again problematic for the rest of the country.

Some other potential cons: It makes it more expensive to bring young horses and sale horses up the levels, which will probably in turn make their prices higher. The cost could discourage ambitious amateurs from really trying to give it a go and/or make it feel impossible, thus not worthwhile to even try. What impact could it have on unrecognized horse trials? Would it make people not even want to “waste” their time at one, needing so many MER’s, or will it drive people away from recognized events entirely and more toward unrecognized? Or away from eventing entirely?

Then again, if all of this really DOES result in keeping horses and riders safer, I can’t argue with that. I’m not confident that it will, because they haven’t shown a lot of in-depth detail on the data behind how these decisions were made. It’s hard to trust or put a lot of faith in numbers or statistics without knowing exactly how they came to be. Maybe if they shared more about this it would help people understand how they came to these conclusions, since it is such a BIG change.

As for the rider classification part, I have no issue with that. It does make sense to me that Phillip Dutton shouldn’t have to have as many MER’s as I do. That’s totally fine with me, and the “unlicensed” label doesn’t bother me the way it has others.

For me personally I think I’d rather see something like 6-7 MER’s, and a reverse qualification like “get eliminated at X level twice in X period of time and you have to move back down and requalify”. Then again, maybe the damage is already done in that elimination. I can see both sides of this, for sure.

I don’t know, this is a hard one for me. Seeing such a drastic rule change was a surprise to me, especially one that would potentially go into effect so soon. There’s some good discussion happening here from both sides of the debate if you want to see more points and opinions. I remain on the fence.

I probably just dated the hell out of myself by using a Yellowcard reference in a post title but come on, you know they were one of the best bands of the late 90’s, early 00’s. They had a VIOLINIST. That’s hard to top, and it’s why they were 100% my favorite band at Warped Tour (2000? 2001? 2002? I forget).

ANYWAY.

Henry is back to living the Only Horse life for the first time since 2018. Well, he’s not alone of course, he has Quinnie, but he is the only one that I’m riding or doing anything with. I can’t quite tell if he thinks this is a good thing or a bad thing. On one hand, more attention equals more cookies, and that’s definitely a good thing.

On the other hand, more attention equals more riding, and he keeps swearing that he’s semi-retired. Even though he’s wild pretty much all the time and gets a lot of joy out of yeehawing his way through everything we do.

I’m amused by it, and happy that he feels good enough to be a dingus, so it’s fine. He did manage to get a week and a half off thanks to the winter storm but on the plus side, before the ice started, he finally got to wear his PS of Sweden quarter sheet. Which… his butt has expanded a little and it’s kind of more like a cape, but whatever.

I’ve also ridden him a little in one of my leather bits. Aside from a few sporadic rides here and there, he’s hardly worn a bit at all in like a year and a half. He’s just a lot more pleasant to ride bitless. He didn’t object much to the leather bit though, at least for Henry (if he doesn’t like something YOU WILL KNOW IT). He chomped on it a little, which is pretty normal for him with any bit, but it was probably one of the best first responses I’ve ever gotten to a bit from him. I still prefer riding him bitless but it might be something else to play with going forward if/when we ever make it to another event and have to dressage. Why did it take me so long to get in on this leather bit thing?

I also finally got around to playing with the knockoff Equiband system that I bought for him months ago.

When he first picked up the trot there were many emotions. He was quite displeased. There was some leaping and cantering in place and then an attempt to just run away from it. He started to settle after a few minutes though, and I did feel him engaging a bit more. He never quite stopped being mad about it, but maybe over time and with more use he won’t object quite so much. It’s funny because I used it on Presto a couple times and Presto never even flicked an ear about the dang thing. Leave it to Henry to bring the drama, per usual.

For his first ride back after the winter storm passed he got roped into ranch horse duty and we rode all around the property looking for tree or fence damage. If you’re gonna look like a ranch QH, you may as well do the job of one.

Yesterday we started back to our cavaletti exercises, and this weekend I’m going to set up a gymnastic. I’m really trying to get his strength and fitness built back up a bit before the super hot weather comes again and he won’t be able to do as much. At this point his gut is outweighing his topline. Maybe it has something to do with his cookie consumption? Neh, that can’t be it…