Week 3 of December

This week passed with zero breakdowns.  Although my husband reminded me that I was not the happiest camper when I was cleaning, purging, and organizing in the family room one day.  That is true, but I get like that every time I clean that particular room.  My daughter could be a poster child for Hoarders R Us, and the two rooms most affected are her bedroom and the family room.  The good news is that the room is picked up and superficially clean.  I still want to do a deeper clean and a little more reorganization, but it is good enough for now.

After getting that cleaning done, I felt so good about my life that I both wanted to and had time to bake cookies with Gemma.  We get a kids cooking kit for her every month and we used one of the recipes from the December kit.  (The kit is from Raddish Kids, and we have found the recipes to be reasonably easy and usually pretty tasty.  The recipes often include a tactile component, like rolling cookie dough into a ball and then dipping in sugar, which Gemma loves.)  We made Chocolate Snowballs, which really didn't look that much like snowballs when they were done baking, but they tasted pretty good, which is the most important thing:)

We also had several days of warm weather, with daytime highs in the mid-60s.  I took the opportunity to work on getting Donut's tail clean.  I haven't posted about this particular issue yet, but I will cover it in more detail at some point.  The short version is that Donut is more averse to water being placed on her body than any horse I've ever seen.  She doesn't mind being rained on, she will drink out of any container, and she will happily walk through deep puddles, but if you come near her with a spray bottle, a hose with water coming out of it (she is fine with the hose and will even pick it up and play with it) or even a damp cloth, she acts like she is a vampire and I just put holy water on her.  I will post about my efforts to work with her separately, but I did want to share my success from this week.

I got a brilliant idea to use a bucket to wash her tail.  (I will note that it is only brilliant because it worked.  Had it not worked, it would have been a catastrophic mess!)  I have been avidly reading the posts on Pro Equine Grooms, and I remembered reading one that mentioned using a bucket to soak the tail before washing it for stubborn dirt and stains.  Well, Donut will eat anything if you put it into a bucket.  I mean anything.  I have yet to find something she won't stick in her mouth.  And she associates buckets with food.  So I decided to take that love of food/buckets and see if she would let me get the bucket with water near her tail.  

I waited until afternoon feeding time, when Donut would expect to be eating for awhile.  Generally, if she is eating in her stall, she's pretty happy to let me do whatever I want (as long as it doesn't involve applying water to her body - ha, ha!).  So I casually walked into her stall with a little bucket.  After first letting her determine that it really was just water in the bucket (she had to drink some to be sure), Donut went back to munching her hay.  So I stuck the bottom of her tail in the water.  And she was totally fine.  I went through little bucket after little bucket, soaking her tail for maybe 30 seconds each time, until I decided to upgrade to a 5-gallon bucket to see what would happen.  Again, she was absolutely fine.  So I went through bucket after bucket after bucket.  The water turned almost black within about 20 seconds of soaking, so I dumped it and get fresh water.

 

Finally I felt brave enough to try some soap.  I used Shapley's Easy Out No-Rinse Shampoo in case my experiment failed and I had to leave some of the shampoo in her tail.  The tricky bit was that the shampoo was in a spray bottle, and I wasn't sure how Donut would feel about that.  As it turned out, she didn't care at all.  So I coated her disgusting tail in the shampoo and then went through several more buckets rinsing it out.  Right about at the point that the water was starting to look not gross after each rinse, Donut let me know she'd had enough by walking around her stall a bit.  So I wrapped things up and rubbed a little Mane 'n Tail Conditioner in the tail and congratulated myself on my genius idea.  (If only my brain could work like this even half of the time, I would be in great shape!) 

And in case you are wondering, Donut still feels exactly the same way about spray bottles, water coming out of hoses, and damp cloths as she did before I washed her tail.  For some reason, she must think of her tail differently than the rest of her body.  It's both fascinating and irritating.  But at least it gives me something to work with.

Speaking of spray bottles, I also finally got around to mounting a towel bar in my tack locker for storing spray bottles.  I can't remember where I saw this particular hack, but it is one that I've wanted to do for years.  I'm so tired of searching for bottles and having them fall over and leak and buying another bottle of something I already have because my bottles are so unorganized that I can't tell what I have.  And I purged the products while I was at it.  I actually found a bottle from before I had Nimo.  (So over 17 years!)  I know because it was labeled with the name of the horse I owned before Nimo.  I can't believe I've been hauling that bottle from barn to barn for so long.  Now, all my spray bottles are neatly organized and easy to get to.  (I used this towel bar.  It was annoying to mount because it doesn't come with a template, but I really like it now that it is up.  My experience seems pretty consistent with a lot of the reviews on Amazon.)

There is even room for another bottle!

But I didn't forget that it was December and I was supposed to be doing Christmas stuff:)  My goal for the week was to write my Christmas letter and get the Christmas cards in the mail.  I admit that I had been sort of dreading writing the letter.  Usually I look forward to it, but I just wasn't feeling the words this year.  What I decided to do to help was to get a new template.  I used to write an actual letter, which I thought was entertaining and delightful, but several people told me that it was too long at two pages.  I'm trying not to judge here, but if a person can't read two pages, what is this world coming to?

Maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I started using a template that forced me to fit everything on one page.  Also it looked nice.  I had ordered it from a shop on Etsy.  This year, I decided to shop around and see what templates were available.  And I found some that included pictures as part of the template.  Which was just perfect.  

My one regret about doing my Christmas card so early was that I hadn't thought to include a picture of Nimo or Donut on it.  Normally, I just have a picture of Gemma (because once you have a kid, that seems to be mostly what people care about), but Nimo was so special that I really wanted to include him somehow.  The pictures in the template were a great way to do that.  I searched until I found a template with four pictures in it, and ordered it and downloaded it.  Then writing and popping the pictures in was so easy!  I had it written and printed within a couple of hours.  (I used this template.)  I am definitely planning to do something like that again.

I spent the week stuffing envelopes and writing short notes to as many of the recipients as I could.  I like to personalize the card whenever possible because it seems like it adds something over just sending a card.  By Friday, I had all the cards sent!

 

Working on the cards felt a little more Christmassy too once the warm weather we had chilled and bits of what was an incredible winter storm passed through on Wednesday.  Some areas north and west of us got 6+ inches and parts of the Northeast got 40 inches!!!  We probably got about two inches that kind of turned to slush and ice because we are almost always on the rain/snow line.  So the ice kind of sucked and not all of it has melted yet, but Gemma was thrilled to go sledding, and it was nice to see some white outside as we approach Christmas Day.  

The narwhal and candy canes are hanging in there!

We love how our magnolia tree is a built-in Christmas tree!

But we didn't neglect our cherry tree:)

The ducks were initially horrified by the sudden change in their circumstances, but they eventually adapted:)

I also used the storm as an opportunity to see how Donut handled some nasty weather.  I never worry about horses when it is just snowing, but we were getting sleet and then rain as the temperature hovered around 32 degrees.  Freezing rain is a condition that can definitely cause problems for some horses, especially when it is paired with wind, as it was in this case.  Donut is turned out all the time except for a couple of hours in the afternoon when she comes in to eat her special food.  So she was out in the weather all day with no blanket, came in for about an hour and a half, and then spent the night in freezing rain, again with no blanket.  The horses had plenty of hay and they do have a run-in shelter that they seem to use if they need it. 

I spent a good two hours out at the barn that day monitoring Donut, and if I had felt at any time that she was struggling with her body temperature, I would have worked on drying her off and kept her in her stall overnight.  But she seemed fine.  She was quite wet, but showed no indication of being cold (e.g. no shivering, no hunched hindquarters), and when I turned her out, she went straight to eating hay and didn't even bother to turn her butt to the wind.  

I'm sure it wasn't fun being out in the storm, but I think horses are equipped to handle bad weather in most cases.  It is my strong preference to avoid blanketing if I can.  I never blanketed Nimo unless I had to keep him clipped through the winter, although I would occasionally put a rain sheet on if we had unseasonably cold weather combined with rain.  I'm hopeful that I can follow the same process with Donut.

There are several reasons I don't like blanketing, although I can certainly understand why people do it.  It can be hard to watch your most beloved pet standing out in miserable weather that you know would make you uncomfortable.  And some horses definitely do seem unable to cope with extreme weather.  But I don't like blanketing because I have never found a barn where the staff can consistently follow my instructions.  Mostly they overblanket, but once I discovered that one of the staff (not at the barn I am currently at) had turned out a fully body-clipped Nimo with no blanket in temperatures right around freezing.  He was lucky that someone found him shivering and got a blanket on him. Overblanketing is not good, but turning out clipped horses without blankets could be risking their lives.  I'm simply not willing to risk it.  So if I can't monitor the horse every day, I don't blanket.  Alternatively, if I need to blanket, I commit to monitoring blanket changes both morning and night.  At my current barn, if I leave a note explaining what I want each day, my instructions are always followed.  But I need to be on top of the weather and that gets exhausting after several months.

I also don't like how filthy the blankets get.  And washing them usually removes the water-proofing (at least in my experience), so then they are pointless for the constant wet weather we have here during the winter.

Plus I've seen a lot of horses either hurt themselves with a blanket or they just play with it and shred it.  Nimo once expressed his dissatisfaction with a Rhino turnout sheet by somehow getting it completely off and then ripping it so thoroughly that he separated all three layers (the inner liner, the waterproof membrane, and the outer cover) and leaving it in a pile that looked like a carcass right in front of the gate.

Not to mention that Donut is growing - she grew five inches in length over a two and a half month time period.  So I don't want to have to buy a new blanket for her every month unless she really needs one.

Anyway, enough of my blanket digression.  I did one more thing this week.  I made a "baby" album for Donut on Shutterfly.  In the past, I've always wanted to do a real scrapbook to document memories.  But the reality is that between my husband and I, we take thousands of pictures a year.  Downloading them off of our phones, organizing them on the computer, choosing which ones to scrapbook, and then actually scrapbooking them has become an exercise in futility.  So I decided that starting with 2019, I would no longer even try to do a scrapbook for anything.  Instead, I would use Shutterfly to make photo albums.  It is a much faster process and my chosen photos are essentially backed up on Shutterfly.  Plus, if something happens to the album, I can reorder it (assuming Shutterfly still makes it).

I had already been working on an album for my daughter, and I was so in love with the process that I decided to start getting Donut's photos organized.  I think I made the album in about three hours over two days.  It is already ordered and on its way.  I'll definitely share some pictures and a video when it arrives to let you know how the final product turned out.  In the meantime, here is a picture of the cover:

To wrap up this post, here is a video of a very spunky Donut from a few days ago (before the snow).