Three is the magic number

When we realized that Cessa had dropped a black colt, there was a long talk had with my husband.  He's not really... horsey.  We don't actually need a third horse - it's more expense, and if he drops out on me, then I've got three animals to try and interact with.  That's not as big a deal right now, but later when they're all under saddle?  There's only one of me!

Yeahhh, wanna guess who lost that discussion?  Much to the total lack of surprise of my barn friends?  lol

So, Bishop is staying.  He's adorable and mouthy as hell (baby, boy, and seems to be a trait Daddy passes on) right now.  No idea what his registered name is gonna be yet, but the balls come off in about a month.

And now that he's out in the paddock, I can get decent pictures!

If only that stupid weed wasn't there!

Not sure why you're still holding me still...

He's kind of an awkward browny-blacky color right now thanks to the foal coat.

Whaaaat is the clicky thing?

Also... y'all, my mare is almost normal horse-sized again.  lol Still not exactly svelte, but not a complete whale!

Ok, now lose more weight so we can actually find your ribs and something resembling a waist...

Surprise!

 

Well, my morning was exciting - how was everyone else's?  lol

Let me start off with the most important details first: it's a boy!  Earlier than expected!  Solid black, with a blaze like a stick with a crescent moon on the top.  As of when I left, he'd done all the things except pee; he gets his IGG check tomorrow, but at this point he seems to be happy and healthy.  At least at the moment, we're calling him Bishop (daddy has a chess-themed name).

Now... details? :)

First of all, can I just say that text chats when the BOs are nocturnal and you're not and the mare has the baby first thing in the morning are fucking hilarious?  Like... this morning's was a picture of Cessa with a white stripe behind her butt, followed by a series of, "Wait, what?", "Is that... a baby?", "I don't know, we're getting pants on to go check," and "Are you even kidding me?" messages.  Which I'll grant you is far more coherent than the last time, when there were five different "baby"s in the chat, with various punctuation, before any of us managed more words, but still pretty damn funny.

We weren't expecting Cessa to foal for another couple of weeks!  She's been in the barn and under camera for a while anyway, because it's been raining constantly and it's way easier to leave her in the stall for vet visits, and because she passed 320 days about a week ago.

So this morning... the BOs went to bed; I got up.  Half an hour after they'd gone to bed, one of them got up and happened to walk past the cameras just in time to see baby boy sitting up out of the bag.

Cue hilarious text messages.

I called in sick - which I'd actually been considering that before realizing there was a baby, because my ridiculous dog decided to refuse to poop until 5 AM this morning and if there had been a chat bubble over my head, it would have just said "..." - and drove up there, and we all sat around chatting and watching momma and baby do momma and baby things until he'd hit most of the milestones and we were all varying levels of "ready for bed" and "starving."

We were all hoping for a girl, except for my husband, who was hoping for... a black boy.  lol So more to come on whether this little guy gets sold or stays...

Bachelor #3

When I wrote my post about Dragon's ancestry, I mentioned the third stallion at the barn (at the time - there's four now!) and how I didn't have any good pictures of him.  Well, turns out he's the boy that got Cessa knocked up, and we ended up taking pictures of him this weekend.  

So now I have pictures!

As for my girls... Oh my god, Cessa is huge.  Poor baby.  She's decided that the stall where they stuck her for her shots when it was raining last week is just... where she lives now.  ("They bring me food, they bring me water, they turn on a fan... why would I leave?" lol)  She's so big, she can't roll over.  And she's uncomfortable enough that she's actually turning down food sometimes - which, y'all.  The only animal I've ever met that was as food-motivated as this mare is my dog, who was half-starved and 15lbs underweight when our friends found him in their back yard.  Poor mare is miserable.  

And Dragon is currently huge too, but in that whole, "Oh my god, will you stop growing vertically, please?" way.  We haven't sticked her, but she's gotta be pushing 15 hands at this point.  Not quite there, but close.

Well

That sound you hear is me laughing so hard there are tears streaming down my face.

The one year we were not gonna check Cessa for pregnancy.  The one year.

But either Cessa's pregnant and due in June, or she has some sort of really weird parasite that kicked the vet during the pregnancy check...

 

Birthday pony and every mare owner's "favorite" game

 So Dragon is now (as of about a month ago) a full-on yearling.  We celebrated this with a tiara, because why would you not?

Local baby very patient with her human's weirdness. lol

And then she went butt-high again, whee.  Like, hilariously, terribly butt-high.  She's been such a pretty baby, up until this winter, but the awkward teenage years appear to have arrived.  lol

Annnd then there's Cessa.

We play this game every spring.  "Is she fat or is she pregnant?"  And every year... it's unquestionably been fat.  But remember how last July she staged the Great Escape?  And at the time, we thought it wasn't a concern that we'd found her with a stallion, because she didn't seem to be cycling?

Yeah, um.  About that "is she fat or is she pregnant?" question.

This was Cessa last year, around this time - right before she went into fat camp:

Round.  Very round. At least she's shiny?

And this... was Cessa yesterday:

Slightly different pose... very different shape.

She's also mushy and sweet to everybody - which... that is not normal.  And her nipples normally point straight down, but right now they're pointing kind of at each other, which is also weird.  And she doesn't have the massively well-defined buttcrack she had last year.

So if anyone hears raucous laughter later this week, that'll be the sound of me and the BOs laughing our asses off if the vet palpates and finds a head, because this was the ONE year we were going to just shrug and go, "Yeah, she's just really fat; let's figure out how to get her off the grass."

(And yes, we've already discussed contingency plans regarding what will happen to baby - ironically, back in July when she hung out with the stud - and contingency plans for if there's no baby and that's all just... fat.  Someone has a new muzzle coming, and I'm GPS tagging this one, damn it.)

Pedigree fun

So... Dom posted about her mare's pedigree (and the fascinating and terrifying adventures in inbreeding it contains), and it got me thinking about Dragon's.

I knew going in what I was doing, choosing the breeding I did.  I had a choice of three stallions and maybe fifteen mares, including my own; theoretically I could have gone for an outside stallion, but that felt like coloring too far outside the lines of the agreement that was on the table.  I wanted a full Sendera Draft, which meant I needed at least 60% draft - which knocked a few potential crosses off the list.  

I particularly liked two of the stallions, who are related (same stallion is the sire of one and grandsire of the other); part of it was conformation and personality.  Nothing wrong with the unrelated guy; he's black with a big fat blaze, and he has a very similar conformation to the other two boys (like - startlingly similar, looks like he's related even though he's not).  I just didn't like the idea of him as a baby daddy as much as I liked the other two for some reason.  One of the related boys has less draft % than the other and a roman nose, which my strongest feeling there was "as long as it doesn't get more roman, it's fine."  (No banana nose, omg.)  The other is a bit smaller in size and not as flashy.  Both related boys have spots, which... I mean, I can take or leave the spots; give me two identically-built horses with the same personality, and I might choose the spotted one, if I like the pattern?

Dragon's daddy

Dragon's uncle

(I don't have a good photo of Bachelor #3 - the pictures I have are gawky three year old, which... he looks like a gawky teenager, lol.)

Picking either one of the spotted boys completely removed several mares from consideration because they were far too closely related.  A few mares I discarded because they drive me nuts - too clingy, in one case, and the others just plain rub me the wrong way, personality-wise.  Eventually, what it came down to for me was it would be silly to not choose the best broodmare on site (or, as it turned out, her daughter) as the mother when she was on offer as an option.  I get along with her just fine, I like how she's built, and I know exactly what she produces because I've seen 3 of her foals and one grandkid grow up.  And that left one of the spotted stallions completely off because he's the best broodmare's son and the daughter's full brother.

Best broodmare

The decision was made to breed both mother and daughter to the same stallion, and I'd get to pick which one I wanted.  Best broodmare twinned twice and then turned up with an infection, so... it was gonna be daughter's baby or wait for the next year for momma's baby.

Dragon's momma

And daughter's baby was awesome.  :)  We ended up here:

Colored-in boxes are duplicate horses.  The stuff I drew boxes around - the red boxes are Percherons, the blue Hackney.  There's more Percheron off the 5-generation pedigree on the other lines, along with a bunch of Appaloosa (no shock - spots gotta come from somewhere) and Quarter Horse, and also some Thoroughbred.  (And I'm just enough of a nerd to be delighted that Man O' War is in there, even if I have to go back 10 generations to find him.)  The mixed breeding was something I expected - the breed is relatively young, as such things go, and outbreeding is a regular thing to keep the breeding population viable.

I... had kind of forgotten until I looked at this again that the sire's dam was the product of what was, at the time, the only remaining "viable" breeding pair in the breed... which at that point the breed had 12 members, and at least three of them were the children of this cross.  Or rather, it was less that I'd forgotten and more that I hadn't realized quite how those two were related.

At least it's not closer?

Side note: Cessa's sire is Dragon's great-grandsire on her dam's side.  I chose to exclude Cessa from consideration for breeding to the related boys because one of them was straight-up her nephew and it felt icky, and the other, the guy that ended up siring Dragon... I dunno, it would have been OK, but much as I like Cessa, getting a foal out of her wasn't a high priority.  It would be neat, for various reasons that are about half sentiment, but she stamps her foals with her head and her personality pretty hard, and I just wasn't convinced that he could tone down the personality.  (Love her to death, but hoo boy, her babies have Attitude.  Which I've been told she did too, when she was younger, and a lot of work went into making her the mostly model citizen she is now.)

I've been doing a lot of digging around past the generations shown here, just because I'm curious, and I have 100% fallen down a "history of the Thoroughbred breed" hole at this point.  I haven't even started in on the other lines - I just picked up with one of the Quarter Horses and all of a sudden I was in TB-land and discovering that there are so many other "Arabians" and "Barbs" and "Turks" around the same time as the Godolphin and Darley and Byerley that I had no idea existed.

Progress shots

Hey, so Dragon will be a yearling in... *checks calendar*  Uh, 11 days?  I had my camera with me this weekend when I went out to the barn, so I got some decent shots of her that aren't cell phone pictures.

Although this phone photo did crack me up.

She's butt-high.  Because of course she is.

Why does my yearling look so adult?!