Mel and children

The more we work with Mel, the more we fall in love with him! He is such a willing and gentle horse! A few weeks ago, when our trainer, Jamie was here, he brought his wife and 2 of their horses, and Jim and Billie rode Mel & Sunny for a trail ride. Up to this point, we were uncertain how Mel would react to outside horses and working side by side with them. He has been, of course, fine around any of our horses, mares included. Mel turned an interested head towards the new mounts, but never tried to pull out of Jim's control. For our trail ride, we rode down our dirt road about 1/4 mile to the township property. This property has several trails weaving through it, as well as a crick that borders the far edge. We rode through the trails, with the crick as our destination. We've ridden our horses back here before, but this was Mel's first time. He crossed the crick with no problem! He even had to walk over a rather high log that was across the trail in one spot. We've taken some video of this event, and are currently working on making a DVD of Mel.

This scrapbook page is of two of our granddaughters, ages 3 1/2 and 18 months. All of the grandkids love visiting with the horses and love riding them. Here, you see the two girls being friendly with Mel (large picture). Hannah is hoping to grab a handful of grass and feed it to him. As you can see the girls and stallion are not the least bit afraid of each other. The second, smaller horse, is Makenna trying to get close to Atta-Boy, and they are just looking at each other. I bent down to Makenna's height to take this picture, and boy, do these horses seem much bigger from this angle! You should try it sometime! To read the journaling, just click on the picture for a larger picture to come up.