Wish we had good news..

The Hanoverian Society did not give enough points to Born in the USA to be Licensed. Most importantly, he was considered too small- both in height and in body type- to look like a stallion. We knew this was a problem going in and we have no idea whether he will grow more in the upcoming year. They mentioned that we could have him re-inspected next year if he grew in to a "Stallion type". The other disappointment was his free jumping. He acted like he had never seen a free jumping chute and he was scared to death to go through it. It just goes to show you never know how they will perform no matter how much practice these youngsters have had. He was great at free jumping at home and he took us all by surprise on Sunday. Although he missed being Licensed by less than 1/2 a point, it doesn't matter anyway. We will probably geld him sometime after Christmas. The good news is, he will make someone a wonderful riding horse one day. We think now we will get him out and show him this year and maybe even look at the 4 year old test. You might want to know that we almost froze to death while we were in Oklahoma and that weather just added to our dismal attitude. Now we are trying to make a plan for the future since we only have 1 stallion and he will be coming 17 in 2010. It is a rather precarious situation for us to be in considering the number of mares we have. It is a concern and a dilemma and we certainly hope that Bonheur will maintain his health and fertility while we stumble around making plans for the future. You can put the violins up now as we are beginning to accept this disappointment. The one thing that keeps us stumped is the surprise that Born stopped growing when he did. Since Whirliegirl is 17h and Bonheur is 16.3h, it's always surprising when an offspring comes up so small. It just goes to show and remind us that shuffling 6 generations on both sides of the pedigree ultimately determines the size of the offspring. Incase you didn't know, Born's full sister, 2 year old Belle Starr, is already 16.2h. Go figure!

We took yesterday off (we needed it) and it was absolutely beautiful weather. We woke up this morning and it was in the low 20's again. We got tough and rode anyway and the horses were all pretty good.

Sharon's husband Lynn, called her right before lunch and said we had an unidentified horse on the back part of our property running with the cows. We couldn't fathom that since our property is fenced and we are not aware of any horses very close by. We thought he just didn't recognize one of them but when we got out there and saw the horse, believe us, no one would have confused it for one of our horses. We were going to take a picture of it to put on the blog but it was just too cold to go back out there. We will post a picture tomorrow and let you be the judge of what breed it is! Patrick thought maybe Appaloosa, Alyssa suggested some sort of

Draft cross, and Sharon was completely baffled. It could be an Icelandic Pony with the amount of hair it has. We weren't able to catch it so we will again try to find its owner tomorrow. We hope somebody didn't just find a way to put it in the pasture as an abandoned animal but it did cross our minds.

We thought you might want to see a couple of the pictures from the inspection.