Day 51 Stronger

I love being at the barn alone.  And with alone, I mean without other humans :-)  Becky is off on a business trip and as much as I enjoy her company, there is just something special about hanging out with the horses by yourself.  It is a welcome change from all the commercial barns I have been at in the past six years where those moments were non-existent. Today I enjoyed every minute of my solitude and only wished the weather had been better and I could have just laid in the grass in the field and watched the horses graze.  Unfortnately we are having our share of sleet and rain and wind.  No hanging out in the muddy pasture for me - can't wait for spring and summer!

Little Love is in heat again, a sign that things are functioning and she is feeling better in her body.  She is allowing Col to lick her and groom her, something that has been completely off limits for the past four week.  When they came in today from the field, they both put their heads over the center divider between their stalls and just stood there leaning into each others necks and breathing each others scent.  Brought tears to my eyes.  They are truly a couple.

Little Love continues to get stronger.  Today was the third consecutive day that she was walking confidently in the arena with the boots and demonstrated a fairly sound walk even in the parking lot.  To celebrate this milestone, I took her out the gate and down the driveway.  Needless to say she was beyond excited (heck, I was excited!).  She was literally looking at every bird, every blade of grass like she hadn't seen it before.  It has been exactly a month since she has been off the property and you could tell.  We walked down the road (with no problem whatsoever, I think she was high on adrenaline) for about 7 minutes and then turned back and walked up again.  I didn't want to go for too long, in case walking on hard ground for such a "long" time would backfire on us by tomorrow.  We walked in the arena for another 15 minutes until Little Love was up to her eyeballs of walking in circles (she was pinning her ears back to tell me she was done). It will be interesting to see how sore she is tomorrow. 

I inspected her "skin condition" today and discovered that there are very very fine hairs growing back on her face where there is a bald spot.  Also, under her tail between her legs there seems to be a barely noticeable growth of hair.  Armpits are still bare, but seems like this might have been an episode of the patchy shedding.  Interestingly her remaining winter hair is sort of changing color from black to maroonish brown.  Strange.  In general Little Love does not look that great, on top of her wildly shedding odd colored hair she has dropped quite a bit of muscle and has a sort of angluar look instead of a round one.  It's hard for me to accept this as I remember what she looked like before.  My brain tells me it is totally normal, as she hasn't done much moving, but I can't help looking at her and worrying.  I know it's insane, because she'll get the muscle back once we get going again.  I guess my only excuse is that I'm only human and I want my black beauty back - now, rather than later. 

Ps. Becky bailed out of trying the bitless bridle the other day... but we'll get there at some point, I hope.