Foaling Journal January 2010

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Jan 5, 2010 The rope lights are up! Lisa gives piano lessons to some of our church family. Thus, we had a household today. What a blessing it was that one of the dad's showed up as driver. He grabbed the drill and started hanging hooks. YAY, the lights are up. One step closer to babies. It was also that depressing day of taking down the Christmas decorations. I feel like the Grinch removing the last ounce of red or green from my home. Our lighted minis and carts just couldn't be packed away, so we moved them to the roof of the barn! They make me smile when I see them from my kitchen window. Jess just had to take this picture of the roof.

Here are the two that are progressing the faster. Morning is to the right. When we get milk from her, it is completely red. In 2008, this puzzled and scared me. Now, I know it is "rusty pipe syndrome" and am not alarmed. Below is Lily eating late tonight.  She is filling up quickly, and her teats are straight down, but she did this also in 2008. That pregnancy, her bag filled up huge and then she just sat like that for about a month. We could never get milk from her to do the test strips with. She didn't have milk until baby was on the ground. This is our only mare that this was true with. The other way that Lily is unique is that she does not come into heat when she is nursing a baby. She is my only mare who does not cycle while nursing.

Jan 11, 2010  I splurged and bought the Equipage system. Lisa and I will both wear beepers this year. Watch them not come until after babies arrive.

Lily is progressing. I gave both her and Morning their shots tonight which include WEE, EE, Flu, Tetanus and WNV. I also got worried and put the foaling halter on Lily and moved Magic into the foaling stalls. I suppose they all are progressing, but Magic's bag is still very small. Lily is a challenge for she does not produce milk until after baby is out. Thus, I cannot test her milk with milk strips. So mysterious! Makes me nervous.

Here is Lily's bag tonight. It seems huge to me until I look back at the pictures from 2008. Her bag looked like a balloon that year, so I am hoping we still have time.

She does not look dropped yet, but this mare is in excellent shape. She even pulled a cart quite a few miles yesterday.

It is almost midnight and Lily keeps laying out on her side. I am watching her via the cameras while the rest of the world sleeps!

Jan 15, 2010 I splurged and bought the Equipage. Our other years, I have used the Foaling buzzers, but we went to the quality foaling alerts this year and bought the Equipage system. All 3 mares had their bellies shaved today, thanks to Jess and David. Magic and Morning are still looking to be out a ways, but Lily's bag has ballooned!

Jan 16, 2010 The Equipage system came today!! It is the day before my birthday (Jessie) and we have some friends from church who are moving out here soon. They came over earlier and brought pizza. We were playing a game after dinner, when the pagers suddenly started going off. All of us jumped up and ran back to mom's room to check the cameras. We haven't left since then, and that was about 8:30pm, and is now 11:00pm. Morning was walking in circles, pawing, not eating, standing funny, and her tail is really loose. For the past three hours this has been going on. She is also holding her tail out and to the side?!?! It is really funny, because we were looking at Morning's 2008 record earlier. The night she had her baby the website said, "A family from church brought us pizza for dinner and they decide to wait the witness the foaling of Morning's baby." We all cracked up because the same family from church brought us pizza for dinner and decided to stay and watch Morning tonight! Anyways, we are all sitting in here getting kinda goofy and mare-staring :) For awhile, we thought she was colicing, until we realized that she was acting like she was going to have a baby and not laying down and rolling.

Thus, I got sent to the barn with a milk cup to get her milk. It is still bloody, but not as deep colored. It did not test like she was going to have it, but according to our friend who hasn't owned horses for over 25 years, she is showing all the symptoms :) of foaling. Actually, she has never had minis. We asked Mrs. R (our friend) how long ago she had horses and how old she was now. We got that she owned horses as a teenager, but couldn't get her age :) I said 39, her son said 42, and then 38, then 29, and it got worse and worse until she decided that she would be better off to give us her real age, 41. It sounded like we were having an auction :) We have had a blast! Oh, and we got hungry, so Lisa and David went to the kitchen and got the leftover pizza, quesadillas, and chocolate bars. Interesting midnight snack!! Mom just laughed at her own joke :) I think we're getting a bit delirious!!! Mom says, "I think she has MORNING sickness." Oh no, now Mom is throwing Kleenex boxes at David. Just kidding :) Well not exactly, she did throw it, but because he needed it. But, it was a very bad catch, so it banged into the window :)

You can see the purple Equipage thing under her halter.

It is almost 1 AM and we are all going to sleep! Mom is now taken over the computer and has concluded that Morning is only having morning sickness. I am counting on Equipage to wake us if we are needed. I am also banking on the fact that the milk strips did not say that Morning would be having a baby.

Jan 18, 2010 I spend a lot of time trying to figure out when baby is coming. I spend way too much time doing this considering it is something I can't figure out. But, here is my new insight. Lily's bag is huge. There is NO WAY she is waiting until Feb. 3 like my chart on top of this page says. So , I went back and looked at her 2009 breeding dates. We bred her 2/17, 2/21 and 2/24. Then, she accepted Donny again on 3/1, 3/2, 3/4, 3/5 and 3/7. But, what if she got pregnant during the breeding that occurred in Feb. and the March breeding dates are useless. If this is true, then 333 days from her last breeding date of 2/24 would make her due on January 22, 2010. That seems to match her progress better!

The date of January 22 is a sad one for me. That is the day that the Supreme Court ruled abortion to be a fundamental right of every woman. How our country is sinning against our Lord. And, now we have elected the pro-abortion, Obama who voted against a ban on partial birth abortion.  I pray that our country will follow 2 Chronicles 7:14 "if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Last night, Lily laid down again and again and again. Not circling, but she still did not want to be up. Her 2008 baby arrived about 10 PM, so I hoping she does that again and does not torture us with a 3 AM arrival. Our mares have tended to have their babies around the same time frame each pregnancy. But, there are exceptions to every rule.

Onto Morning....If she actually got pregnant on her first breeding to Warrior, then her last breeding date would have been 2/16/09. In 2008, she gestated for 341 days making her due also on January 22. Well, maybe January 22 will take on a new meaning for me.

January 21, 2010

Could she get any bigger? She is so full. We are getting record amount of rain here in Phoenix. Lisa, Jess and I spent the morning berming the stalls so that the rain does not slide in. Hopefully, she will have a dry stall. I think I need to ask Bill to bring me some straw so I can make the stall dry in a hurry if need be. Phoenix only gets about 7 inches of rain per year and we are getting 4 inches in this storm. Our land, barn, etc, is not structured for that much rain! Bill came home and our General Store was out of straw. My luck! Lily looks even bigger by night fall. Everyone keeps saying that this huge storm we are enduring is going to cause my mares to foal. Well, Lily looks ready anyways, but Morning and Magic do not. My pasture is a lake!

Just when I think that there is no way Lily can wait any longer to have that baby, I look back at her pictures in 2008. This picture to the right was taken 3/21/08 and and this was 14 days before she foaled. So, we could still be in for a long wait. Why do I emphasize the bag so much? There are many signs to help us predict the time of foaling. Click here to read some. I plug numbers into the foaling calculators and try and calculate when this will happen. I found straw today and reassembled our foaling kit. Click here to see what we have inside of it.

January 23, 2010  by Jessie, now age 13!

We just came home from a farewell party for a family in church who is moving to Germany, and just Mom and I (Jessie) came home to milk-strip the mares. I went down to the barn, and started milking Morning. Her bag is still tiny, but she has WHITE milk. Out of the teat that usually gives blood, was coming milk and blood. I would get a streak of blood, and then milk. Out of the other teat it is totally white. Then I went to Magic's stall. This whole time Lily was laying down, but she wasn't laying flat out, and my big horse Tommy was down. I figured it was nothing, obviously horses lay down sometimes!! I finished Magic (although I couldn't get anything over two drops) and went into Lily's stall. I stood there for a couple minutes in her stall without her getting up, which is unusual. Lily is usually pretty touchy and will get up quickly. Then I started clucking at her and urging her to get up. Nothing happened. I grabbed her foaling halter and didn't pull hard, because I knew I could force her up, but I didn't want to go there yet. She still didn't move. I called Mom and she came down and told me to grab her halter and pull her up. She came up then, and she has DROPPED!! Right above her tail head has totally caved in and is as soft as it can be for a horse who is very in shape! We are getting there on Lily. Well, I guess we have been saying that for a while now!! Last Sunday, Mom said Lily couldn't hold out another week. She has one night left!!! Magic's bag is REALLY growing. The teats are still pointing in, and she doesn't have enough milk to test yet. Her bag has grown quickly. Lily has a very strange dip in her teats and I don't know what it is. You can see it in the picture of Lily. The black bag is Magic and the pink bag is Lily. Magic does not worry us like Lily does. This is because Magic will give us milk that we can test with and Lily never gives any milk.

Jan 26, 2010

IT'S A GIRL!!! Magic foaled a beautiful palomino filly around 7:00 this morning. It was a red bag delivery, but everything ended up going fine! Click here for the  full screen video of our red bag birth!   Click here for more pictures   Click here to read more about what a red bag is and what to do in this case. My oldest daughter is my barn heroine! She is so much more emotionally controlled than I am. To see another dystocia birth and read her story about delivery, click here.

Jan 27, 2010

After yesterday's birth, I am so convinced that if a person breeds a miniature mare, that they then need to read and read and talk to others about the emergency situations. In 2008, we went to a clinic on dystocia and took notes that are outlined on our site. By breeding a mare, this is the commitment that we made. The book, The Complete Book of Foaling, is an excellent tool. When an emergency birth occurs or any type of dystocia, you will not have time to wait for your vet, or your neighbor. Be ready. The dystocia that we helped with in 2009 could have had a disastrous outcome if intervention was not immediate. The longer you wait to intervene, the more the baby gets crammed against the pelvic wall and the tighter everything gets. If you are there when it all starts, you can intervene by rearranging baby and help out, most of the time. Yes, we call our vet, but thankfully, we have been able to call as he is on his way and tell him that baby is out and all is well.

When we started, I ordered 2 of the Foal Buzzers . These worked, and I used a Sony Baby Monitor to pipe the sound into my bedroom. The problem is that the roosters and the Pyrenees were also piped into my bedroom. You can see how we set up the barn using this system by clicking here. These $60 buzzers worked adequately, but there are many advantages to the Equipage system. Thus, I took the big plunge on my birthday this year and bought the Equipage system from Kee-Port. It was worth it. Here is the link to read about this system.  When this beeper sounds off in my bedroom, it wakes me up. I think it is easier to discern because I don't have the roosters and banging of the feeders to sleep through. When we were using only the buzzers, I had to learn to sleep through a lot of noise. This made it so I would also sleep through the buzzer noise. With the Equipage system, I can also silence the beeper from my bedroom when there is a false alarm. There are also not so many false alarms. The buzzers sound off whenever a mare shakes her head; whereas the Equipage only beeps if the mare has been laying down flat for more than 8-10 seconds. The Equipage beepers are also something I can wear and walk even to my neighbor's home and still be within range. When I was relying on the buzzers, I had to stay by a Sony Baby Monitor that had a very limited range. So far, the Equipage has worked up to a mile away.

Seven people slept in my bedroom last night with their hopes on meeting baby Lily/Donny. Baby Magic has been called Joy by everyone  that sees her. She has met many, many people already. Mom has a clipper addiction and has taken them to her whiskers. This is one sweet filly!

Jan 29, 2010 We are really hoping that Lily has her baby tonight because there is a full moon. But, this is no regular full moon. It's supposed to be the biggest full moon of the year, so we are crossing our fingers that it pulls that baby out of Lily. We have our "adopted" sister, Kailey, our cousin, and her daughter here to spend the night and hopefully witness a baby being born. So, we'll see if the theory over the full moon holds any weight or not. Lily has been laying down for the past half hour or so, but no action......yet. We will update later!

She is leggy! Bailey, her handsome daddy, is FAST and could out trot most anyone! She is for sale

Click here to go the February Nursing Journal 2010.

We have kept journals during all of our births. This began to help a friend in Maine, but then we discovered that it was a good way to keep track of a mare's foaling pattern. Here are previous journals:
 

Miniature Horse Foaling/Nursery Journal of 2008!!!!!

      February 2008 Includes our pre-foaling preparations

      March 2008 Includes the foaling by Lucky Four Real Doll

      April 2008 Includes the birth by Magic, Lily, Morning and.....(Read about 2 mares foaling the same night!)

      May 2008 Includes the birth by Jewel (Dystocia)

Miniature Horse Foaling/Nursery Journal of 2009!

       May 2009 Foaling by LK Supreme Dream mare!

       June 2009 Foaling by Orion Light Vant Huttensest daughter (dystocia)

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