Let The Racing Begin

As many of you may know, Jessie is my 'social bug'. She has always wanted to be involved with what is going on......anywhere just about.   When she was little, like 3 and 4 little, she would walk up to complete strangers and ask then if she could stay the night at their house!!--Scary if your her mom!!  She considered anybody that would smile and say hi a friend of hers; she has learned since then, and this is sad actually, that not all people are friendly and needless to say, this hit her hard the first time she realized it-me too(yes, there where tears, my tears)  

Anyhow, as parents, we know that its important for your kiddos to of course have friends and be involved in good activities.  Jessie has a love for animals(imagine that) and after learning about 4-H a couple years ago and a lot of talking and some help from some friends, we decided to let her show a heifer. Boy, was that an experience for all of us.  I'm sure we did just about everything wrong that a '1st timer' in the showing cattle world that anybody could do.  Yes, the halter got put on backwards a couple times, the heifer got away.......twice just to name a couple and for whatever reason, she really didn't like men which of course didn't help Bryan's feelings towards this project at all. So, long story short, we managed to get her heifer to the fair and thankfully had much needed help on getting her unloaded(that was scary and painful for our helper) but after the first night she seemed to settle in with all that was going on and by the next day she did very well.  Jessie showed her very good.

We did decide though that this was not something we were ready for in more ways then one and so we had Athena(the heifer) go back to the ranch that she came from-this was very hard especially for Jessie.

We wanted to continue to keep Jessie involved in something that we knew/thought she would enjoy. A friend of ours told us about the Nevada Bandits club in Elko-a gymkhana centered club(barrel racing, poles, etc........timed speed events on horseback)  This turned out to be perfect-Jessie loves horses and we already own the horses.  So last year was her first year at it and she did really well.  She's not the fastest but they ran the patterns beautifully and she still placed 3rd in her division.

So now this years season has started........in February was the first show.  This year though, I decided that I would 'race' with her-gotta do something with these horses instead of just feeding them!  The weather was still quite cold so we didn't practice as much as we would of liked but thankfully it warmed up a bit the day of the show.  

 Yes, she is as tired as she looks!  We had a very long day followed by a long night.  We were blessed to be able to come over the day before and stay with a friend at her sister's house in Lamoille.  This place was beautiful and complete with pastures for the horses but let me back up a bit.  Before we got to where we were staying, our friend blew a tire on her horse trailer-loaded with 3 horses- on the interstate as we were coming down the Emigrant Pass.  We got stopped, and where getting ready to see if we could changed this tire and thankfully realized before we got to far that the spare was also flat-the valve stem somehow got broken after she put it in the trailer.  UGH!!!!   So, we decided to crawl our way into Carlin to the tire shop there; got the valve stem fixed, changed the flat and we were on our way.  At this point the wind is really blowing.
   We made it to our destination, unloaded the horses, walked the pasture looking at the fences and for anything that might be a danger before we turned them out and then walked them around a bit before letting them go.  They of course, being horses, were quite 'excited' about the new place ran around bucking and just being silly but after some hay was put out for them they calmed down.  The wind never 'calmed' down that night and this kept the horse on edge........and me too!
   At about 10:00 that night I decided to go do my last check on them before I headed to bed.   They came trotting up to me and my flashlight caught something I didn't want to see......blood! and lots of it, so much in fact you could see the hair on her leg!  Jessie's horse, Nina was/had been bleeding a lot!!  I ran in and got Sandy, we grabbed some rags and a bucket of warm water and a halter.  After catching her-so far she wasn't limping- we started washing the blood looking for this gaping hole/gash that we thought she would have.  We were shocked to find a half inch(if that) hole-a puncture though that obviously severed a pretty good vessel.  We were very much relieved but still concerned about how she would be the next day.  We decided that the hole was probably caused by a willow branch-there was a row of willows along the irrigation ditch in the middle of the pasture.  After putting a bandage on her leg and  looking everyone else over, we gave them more hay and went to bed...........but not to sleep.

   The next morning the wind was still blowing but had died down a bit.  The horses were happy to see us and no one had anymore injuries.........a very deep sigh of relief!!   When it was time to load up, Nina decided that she wasn't about to be caught and ran around quite a bit so that was another big sigh of relief-Jessie could still compete today!

  It ended up being a great day, long but time well spent once again with family and friends having fun. Nina ran well all day(we kept a light wrap on the puncture) and Jessie won a halter for the day.  It was dark by the time we got home and believe me we were ready for bed!
   Nina's leg has since healed up beautifully and we just had our second show this past week-I'll be posting on that soon but I will give you a little info-it was much more relaxing  :)