Scary Chairs

I was interested to see how much of yesterday's short lesson Skeeter remembered when I went to feed this morning.

She did such a good job!  I had to tell her "Get back!" and get big for just a second and then she remembered and stepped away from the gate so I could come in with the hay.  She kept a polite distance from me and the hay until I told her it was okay to eat.

Jay  and I planned on just hanging out with Ranger and Skeeter today until his mom and sister came over to meet them, so we took along some camp chairs.  Jay set them up in the part of the shed that's outside of Skeeter's pen.  She was curious about them, but not very scared, so I folded one up and put it against the rail to see how she would react.


I'm astounded at the smarts this horse has.  She's very solid minded and able to reason things through.

In fact, I'm at a loss with her right now - I thought we'd be at least a week away from doing half of what we're doing.  Back to the drawing board to figure out where to go from here.  (But in a good way.)

Today is Jay's birthday and we celebrated by having a Meet Skeeter Day, so we invited our families out to L.E.'s house.  I forgot to get pictures of Jay's family and almost forgot to get pictures of Nebalee's, but I managed to snap a few.

There was a lot of commotion with a lot of people around, but it didn't seem to bother her one bit.  In fact, she laid down for a quick scratch at one point.  (And of course, got ooohhed and aaaahhed over.)

I know she's itchy from shedding out - she's been using the support beam in her pen to scratch on, so I said, "what the hell?" and went to get the shed blade.  She pretty much thought that was the best business in the world.  Nothing bothered her as I was using the blade on her - she let me do both sides, her back, her belly, and the tops of both front legs.  Not a flinch.

Ashinator and her boyfriend hung out with Nebalee's family and Skeeter for a while and left, so it was just Jay and me sitting in the scary chairs for a bit.  I went and got Ranger from Estes' pen, where he'd been grazing and for the first time, I heard Skeeter's voice.  She didn't say a word when I moved Ranger out of the pen, but boy did she want to talk when he came back home.  Not one peep from her since she was unloaded from  the trailer and not a peep when I took Ranger away, but she was awfully glad to see him when he came back and gave him the full run-down of her day.  Like a typical guy, he humored her and went promptly to sleep standing in the sun.

I decided that since she was so good with the shedding blade, that I needed to do her mane, too.  She didn't care.  I got about half of her mane and her forelock combed out without any problems (from the horse, that is.  I had problems with that much loose hair!) and she looked beautiful.  With the weather coming in, I'm sure it'll be back to a tangled mess tomorrow, but she looked purdy for her visitors.

Ranger roused himself from his grass coma to let us know when my friend Jen and her family showed up.

His job done, he went back to his grass coma, while Skeeter soaked up all the attention again.

I can't begin to tell you how happy I am with her and how smart she is.  She's just so ... right.  Now I really hope I don't screw her up!