Appreciate the Adventure

Do you know how horses stay warm?  They shiver.  Shivering burns calories.  Calories come from food, particularly hay.  This is why horses are called “hay burners,” making horses very energy inefficient.  The colder is gets, the more the horse has to shiver to stay warm, and the more hay he has to eat to continue shivering.  For the horse owner, this is an expensive process.  To keep my horses from burning as many calories, I blanket them to cut back on how much I’ll have to feed them.

A farrier once joked that I blanket every animal on my property, to which I replied that I do not, in fact, put blankets on the chickens.  He just laughed it off as the reason for that is because no turnout blanket manufacturer sells a chicken turnout rug.

Chaco also has a turnout rug, but she prefers to go naked when possible.

Brinn can’t bear for my horses to have anything unless his donkey can have it as well.  This is the reason why our miniature donkey eats Strategy, MSM, and coat supplements.  He also gets his own turnout blanket.

When we first bought Dominick, he suffered from poor nutrition, leaving him with a dull, dry coat.  A sleek shiny coat offers more than cosmetic benefits –shiny hair is oily hair, and repels water.  During a day of freezing rains, Dominick’s hair didn’t shed any water, and instead he saturated.  After soaking through, the water then froze.  He was the saddest, most pitiful donkey you’ve ever met.  This was simply unsatisfactory on the Kiser homestead, so we had to thaw and dry out Dominick.  Since my barn’s not finished yet, we didn’t have any choices exept bringing him in the house, so we pulled him into the basement and proceeded to blow dry him.  We expected this to end disastrously, but surprisingly Dominick absolutely loved his salon treatment.

Not only does the herd have blankets on during the snow showers this weekend, but they all have on double layers.  Bear, Reggie, Ghosty, and Dominick each have on two blankets right now.  I’m sure they’re all feeling a bit like the Michelin Man, but I’m reassured when I reach a hand under their rugs and feel warm horse.  It gives me peace of mind so that I can reenter my warm, heated home with no guilt for the welfare of my animals.

While Ian and I recovering from our colds, we’ve spent most of the cold weather staying warm inside.  Ian’s starting to feel better, so now he’s trying to make up for the time he lost to this cold.

He’s played hard all weekend.  In 10 minutes, he can completely undo what took me 45 minutes to straighten up.  But I hear him waking up now, so my blogging time is cut short as my little monster is ready to come out and play some more.  We only have 2 and a half hours left to get ready for the superbowl, so Ian and I must get started on our wings.

While trying to wrap up my workday yesterday, Brinn called and frantically recounted a horrifying experience.  Ian was choking on a piece of tennis ball!  After my initial freak out, I realized that I heard a very healthy set of lungs screaming along with Brinn.  After pointing this out to Brinn (you know, that screaming = breathing), he still wasn’t coming back down to planet Earth.  Granted, he was the one holding the screaming child (particularly the child who rarely cries or screams) and had watched the tennis ball fragment disappear as he grabbed futilely for it.  Reasoning with the husband was obviously out of the question.  He only found solace when I agreed to call the pediatrician.  Dr. Batson’s nurse assured me that unless he has having trouble breathing, he would be just fine.  Brinn refused to believe me, however, and had to call her himself.  apparently pediatric nurses don’t carry enough credibility as far as procedure for infants consuming tennis ball fragments, so Brinn also called his sister, a doctor in Chattanooga.  She finally managed to persuade him that it wasn’t a big enough piece to hurt him, and that if he swallowed it, his airways are clear.  So did any of this really get through to Brinn?  Of course not.  He still sat up over half the night, kept Ian up half the night, and kept me up quite a bit to constantly check Ian’s breathing and color.

Now, let me add some context to this tale.  Brinn cares deeply about everything he holds dear.  Four summers ago, Mogwai choked on a stick.  Brinn scooped him up, ran to the car, screamed at me to come on (without letting me lock the house) and had me calling the vet from the road.  When one vet told us to wait until he came back in an hour, Brinn flew to the Interstate to drive all the way to Crossville to see my horses’ vet.  Brinn refuses to ever visit the unavailable vet again.  This is how Brinn reacted to his 3 month old puppy’s suffering.  Now we are a bit indulgent of our fur-babies, BUT that’s nothing compared with how much Brinn cares for his little boy.

More context: Ian is congested with a cold right now.  He was having trouble breathing before the tennis ball entered into the picture.  Ian has also cried a lot the last few days because his little throat hurts.  I know exactly how he feels.  Well, almost exactly.  I have the same cold, but I can blow my own nose so I don’t have to endure the dreaded snot sucking bulb.  Oh, how he hates this bulb!  Ian cried quite a bit last night, and today.  Brinn’s convinced it’s due to the tennis ball (which has passed, by the way).

Brinn’s solution: the poor puppies aren’t allowed to bring their toys inside any longer.  I feel like I’ve truly become a southern woman today; every time I think of Brinn I want to say, “Bless Him.”  But he’s beating himself up for an accident.  Brinn gets down on hands and knees at least once a day to try to see the world from Ian’s perspective so he can identify potential hazards before Ian does.  Brinn’s convinced he’s a bad parent for letting this one thing slip through his radar, so tennis balls have become a strictly outside toy in the Kiser home.  I haven’t broken the news to Mogwai yet.

My poor little boy is such a tough trooper.  He tries hard to not cry, and he’ll even ask to go play in the floor.  But then I’ll feel tiny hands using my jean’s to pull himself up, then a little tug on my shirt tail.  Looking down at those big blue eyes just about kills me.  It doesn’t matter what I’m holding; I have to drop everything to make him first priority.  This has caused dinner preparation to drag by extremely slowly.

See how hard he tries to be tough and cheerful despite his congestion!

Ian loves when we sing to him, but I’ve had to change the lyrics a bit.  As with my animals, I want my child to learn that his name is who he is, so I like to personalize his music a bit to try to engage him a bit more.

• Little Ian had a farm
• e…i…e…i…o
• And on that farm he had a Reggie
• e…i…e…i…o
• With an oink oink here
• And an oink oink there
• Here an oink
• There an oink
• Everywhere an oink oink
• Little Ian had a farm…

See?  We add Ian’s critters into the song as well, and change their sounds to be a bit more realistic.

In all seriousness, Little Ian does have a little farm.  I grew up around a menagerie of animals and want him to do the same.  Animals teach compassion, responsibility, dedication, and reward.  It’s one thing to own a bicycle, it’s another entirely to own an animal whose very existence depends on you.  I want Ian to always understand that his actions have consequences.  Who better to teach him that than animals?  If you jerk on Bear’s reins or flop on his back, he’ll be happy to put you on the ground.  If you scare Chaco, she runs to my bedroom and hides.  If you throw the ball for Mogwai, you commit yourself to at least an hour of playing fetch.  Consequences!

At just eight months old, Ian already has such a love for animals.  I’ve written before about how much he loves his puppies, and how much he enjoys bouncing on Reggie, and now he’s learning the delights in raising chickens.

Ian gets so excited when he sees us pulling on our mud boots –he knows that means we’re going to feed animals.  Our newest chickens cluck and and carry on louder than any other chickens we’ve ever had.  Ian giggles up a storm when he hears the chickens’ racket.  If we make clucking noises at Ian he grins and crawls towards the back door.

Another of Ian’s favorite features of farm life is John Deere.  Just as Ian loves riding Reggie, I think he loves driving the tractor even more.

I don’t think this upsets Grandpa too much as he’s a diehard John Deere fan.  In fact, he’s even brought Ian quite an array of John Deere and Carhartt overhauls and shirts.  If you’re going to be a farm kid, you’ve got to dress the part!