Baby Girl was practically born in a barn. Nine months pregnant I was still driving a tractor and going to horseshows. I was, in fact, at a show the Sunday before she was born. My Dad had purchased the “ATV of strollers” so that we would be ready after she was born because there wasn’t a chance I wasn’t going to continue where I left off. She has been to countless horseshows since, and only for a little while when she was about 1 and a half to 2 years old was it very difficult. Now that she can walk and play and ride (some) she is pretty easy at horseshows. She collects rocks and plays with her toys and loves all the attention she gets.
Baby Girl loves all animals. She will say pretty much anything other than a dead cricket on the floor in our house is cute. Frogs, cats, puppies, any and all dogs, horses, goats, pigs, she loves them all. Her very first word was “meow” because she was copying the cat in our house. Now she tells him to Hush! and Get Down! and constantly asks for treats to feed him. (We’ve progressed from her eating the treats to actually giving them to the cat!). She is super sweet with other animals, too. Except occasionally when she tortures the cat on purpose because he lets her. She will pat the horse as she is riding it, she will be so soft and sweet with anything new she finds. You can tell she just adores them all. I even got her to kiss a frog once and it was surprisingly easy. She wants to pet the chickens and birds and is totally devastated when they fly away before she can reach them.
She has been, literally, raised in a barn. The work didn’t stop because the baby was born. It was achingly hard for awhile, for me, to watch as my husband and my employee Hannah did everything I wanted to do while I stayed inside with the baby, or walked around the property with her but couldn’t take my eyes or hands off her even for a second. As she has gotten bigger, however, she can run around and play while I do things in the barn. I can’t ride yet while she’s with me, but we clean stalls and feed the horses and get the hay and fill grain buckets and sweep and a million other little things that make me happy. She tries so hard to help. Being outside makes her happy too. She can find a stick or a flower or a mushroom or a pile of gravel Dada would rather she not spread out, and be completely absorbed for at least ten minutes at a time. (Ten minutes is a looonnngg time to a toddler). The pile of gravel is the BEST fun. When it was a huge pile she would climb and slide and climb and slide and got fantastically dirty. Later that day when I went to change her diaper, I pulled her pants off and gravel flew everywhere. Mind you, she had already taken her nap in her bed with this gravel in her pockets!
I used to have to have someone stay right on top of her at all times while I was teaching lessons. Now she will play inside or outside the arena while I teach. I would prefer outside of course, but sometimes she sneaks in to collect all the flowers from the flower boxes. She likes to get one of each color and then proceeds to tell me which is pink, which is blue, which is yewwow. She’s learned to get out of the way of the horses. She knows what it means when they jump. She will watch videos of the girls riding with me, when we’re in the house. But most important of all, she wants to WIDE herself. If she gets in the mood she will cry and beg and stomp and tell me 18 times that she wants to WIDE. Honestly it’s music to my ears. I love that she wants to ride so badly. She is certainly not afraid. She only walks, of course, but that is good enough for her and good enough for Mama right now too!
I decided a couple of months ago she was going to do lead line in our Year End Show coming up this weekend. She is now the proud owner of jodphur pants, paddock boots, black teeny tiny gloves she probably won’t wear, a belt that Dada made out of an old rein, a pink polo shirt and a white turtleneck. You never can tell with the weather in Texas. Of course she has a helmet, and a black cover for it. She’s totally ready for Sunday’s lead line class that Mama is highly anticipating. She will probably refuse to WIDE that day. It wouldn’t surprise me. You never can tell with bees.
When we are outside you usually have to bribe her to get her back inside. It may be wet, cold, windy but that little barn rat wants to be out in it! She wants to run up and down the paddock aisle while I feed the horses, she wants to help feed the horses grain and hay. She wants to climb on the gates. She now knows which bucket is “Sugar’s” and she can say the names of some of the horses (Sugar, for example. And Gracie.) She loves to splash in water, muddy or not. She does not care how dirty she gets.
As the era of the official “barn rat” seems to be coming to a close, it brightens my day and my heart to see her so happy outside and in the barn. Out of all the thousands of pictures I have of her outside, in the barn, and riding, it will be difficult to choose one for this story. I hope this story doesn’t have an ending. I pray that Baby Girl continues throughout her life to be a Barn Rat. Like her Mama.
