Honest Scrap Award

This little blog of mine has (waaaay back in July!) been awarded the Honest Scrap Award three times! Go Diego Go, If the Trees had Ears, and Endurance Granny all nominated me! Thank you. I'm honored, but haven't been blogging an awful lot lately, so it's taken me a while to get around to posting this!

When you receive The Honest Scrap award you must stick to some rules:

Recognize your award presenter and link back to their blog in your post.

List 10 honest things about yourself that others might not know.

Present this award to 10 admirable bloggers and link to their blogs.

Leave a comment on your recipients' blogs to let them know to visit your post to retrieve their award.

Here are 10 honest scraps about me:

1. I am ridiculously excited about the birth of our son, who's estimated due date is November 1st. I cannot wait! Getting to meet him, to hold him, nurse him, bathe him, introduce him to our daughter, who will be 22 months old when he's born - I just can't wait.



2. I am a stay at home mom, and I absolutely love it. I think if you are a mommy, that is the most important job that absolutely needs first priority over everything else. No one else can impact the lives of your children more than the person who cares for them most of the time, which ideally, is their mother.



3. I really enjoy working in the kitchen. I've started baking our bread (have you had french toast from homemade bread???), we preserve a lot of foods that we grow in our own garden, I make my own refried beans - in my not-so-humble opinion, my family eats REALLY good, every time I fix dinner! And surprisingly, the more I cook, the easier it is to maintain a healthy weight - I guess less eating out is the key to that one?



4. When driving my car, every time I see a nice little ditch, or woods, or farm lane - I picture myself riding Arabee, right down to the gait we'd be riding in, the feel of her motion, the smell of the horse, the sound of the saddle and her hoofbeats.



5. It's a lot harder to come up with 10 things than I expected it would be!



6. I don't want to be a "sheeple." As in, it's important to me to make decisions based on what is best for the situation, rather than what everyone else is doing. It may seem easier to just go with the crowd, but that isn't always the case.



7. I'm firm in my faith, and that is what keeps things going. Without God, nothing is possible - but with God, all things are possible. There's so much more to being a Christian than just going to church on Sundays, and it took me a long time to realize how freeing it is to rely fully on Jesus for all things - I guess I'm still learning that.



8. I've always loved animals, and horses especially - but I never wanted to be a vet, because animals don't like vets! They just don't understand the fact that that guy with the needle is actually helping them.



9. Even before I ever met my husband, I always felt that farmers were the best people - hard working, honest, and trustworthy. I married into a farming family, and now I know that's true. Farmers were (and still are) the first to be good stewards of the land, have always wanted the best for the animals they raise, and even so, they catch a lot of slack for using the best management practices, from environmentalists and animal rights groups that simply don't understand the reasons certain practices are in place.



10. My family lives in a home that was built by my husband's great great grandmother, built in 1902/1908 (exact year not certain) that we renovated in 2005, the year we were married. I love our home's charm, and have been really enjoying building flower beds and learning about perennials to add to our landscaping. I am taking forever to hang things on our walls, because I want to be sure it is just right! Barring flood (unlikely, since we live on a big hill) or fire, or tornado, we plan to live here forever, so I guess I have plenty of time to decorate.

And, here is my list of blogs I will nominate for this award. I'm going to keep it to the blogs I make sure I read every post on, but I do follow quite a few additional blogs that are also great, and I check in on others that I don't officially "follow" so please don't feel slighted if your blog isn't included here. I get a lot out of every blog I read, but I enjoy the ones I am listing the most.

1. Generation Cedar - a Christian blog which has included several eye-opening and thought-provoking posts, things that make me question things I never really thought about before.


2. The Equestrian Vagabond - often breathtakingly beautiful horse photography!


3. Endurance Granny - I met Jacke at the 2008 AERC National Championship ride in Clarksville, and enjoy reading about her bitless, barefoot trail riding, and enjoy riding with her when we had the chance, and hope to do so again after this baby is born!


4. Karen's Musings and Endurance Ride Stuff - this blog is full of information pertaining to endurance riding, especially interesting for me since I choose to keep my horses barefoot.


5. The Barb Wire - Beautiful photography, amazing writing, and full of useful information that relates to the sport of endurance

Interesting Horse Watering Product

I found this website today for the H2orse Animal Watering System.

My first thought when seeing this waterer is that it may be the perfect solution to both hauling water from home, and watering back at the trailer when finished riding for when we haul out for training rides at various parks.

I'm picturing mounting the waterer directly to the side of the trailer where I tie the horse.

I emailed the inventor with these questions: Would the plugs hold up at highway speeds to keep the water in the tank and out of the drinking bowl? What are the dimensions of this product? What does it cost?

I'll update this post when I get a response.

Adventures WithOUT Arabee

Last spring, I wrote about how I was able to use an indoor arena a couple of times to ride in. That's the same place I go now once each week to volunteer for a therapeutic riding program called Reins to Recovery.

It has been a really great experience. We have one rider at a time in a 45 minute lesson, and as a volunteer I help by grooming and tacking up the horse before the lesson, either leading the horse or being a "sidewalker" - someone who walks next to the rider to help make sure they stay on, and then untacking and grooming after the lesson. It's a pretty simple job, but it has been so much fun, and very rewarding. It's great to get to see improvement in the rider, and to be a part of it.

This Sunday, August 23rd, they will be having a fundraising event in Nashville, IN, from 1-5pm. A hog roast, a silent auction, dancing, live music, pony rides, games - should be a fun time that will benefit a great cause. I have some tickets to sell if anyone is interested in attending!