Hi all. I've been a DG member for a while and loved horses all my life, but hadn't really been in this forum much. I'll try to tell my story as concisely as possible.
I have two daughters, and my older one (Sydney, 11 yo) is as horse crazy as I was. My parents live just a few miles from us and they still have two of the horses I grew up with, my 25yo mare, Satin (as in the fabric, not the demon, although sometimes I wonder) and my mom's 23 yo mare, BW. Satin has always been kinda goofy so I never could trust her as a kid horse even at 25. BW was doing really great, but a couple of years ago she came up lame on her right front ankle and hasn't really been sound since then so that kinda ended Sydney's opportunities to ride, although she still grooms, bathes and cleans out stalls.
My parents' intentions had been to just keep Satin and BW til they lived out their lives and be done with horse ownership. But weekend before last, while looking for a horse trailer, Dad took a liking to a horse he spotted on Craigslist and they wound up buying him (ostensibly for my dad, but we all know it's for Syd to have a horse she can ride). Did I mention that my parents are really wonderful?
The new horse's name is Harley and he's a 7 year old gorgeous Buckskin. He's not exactly the plodding, slow, tired old kid horse you see at summer camps, but he seems to be steady not spooky, and he's had some good training. However, he does have a fair amount of "go" in him. He does fine in the round pen at my parents' place and Syd has been able to ride him at a walk there, but I'm not comfortable that she'll be able to control him well in the higher gaits yet. Tonight we took him down to the local arena and he felt like he was wound tighter than he was the other time I rode him there, which was when we went to evaluate him before buying him. I had hoped to let Syd ride him down there, but he was too ready to go.
Anyway, that's the story, as short as I can make it. I hope to get to know some of you great horse people around here. I've been lurking for the past couple of days and decided it was time to introduce myself. Here's a pic of Syd on Harley.
