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| Would you like to meet the boys? |
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I had selected my stallion, found a mare, and had only to wait for Dolphin to foal and for my tax refund to arrive. (This adventure is a tax refund gift to myself!) Dolphin was near term when I had seen her at the end of February but she kept everyone waiting. I finally got the news on the morning of my birthday, March 16, that she had presented them with a huge bay colt. Odin rarely sires colts so this one was sold immediately at birth.
Dolphin came into heat about a week earlier than we had expected so the vet came out to ultrasound and palpate her. Her follicle was four and a half centimeters and she was on schedule to ovulate the next day so I made a rush call to Carol Ives to have Inbegriff collected. Her timing also meant that I would need to drive up to Washington on an afternoon when I usually have my children so I had to make arrangements for them to stay at Grandma's house. I swear Dolphin planned it so that I would experience the maximum amount of inconvenience, maybe in order to prove my love and devotion to her? Are horses really that manipulative? |
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Everything was in place for me to pick up my semen on the afternoon of April 21 and drive it up to Woodmont Farm where Dolphin was. In my eagerness to get things moving, I arrived a little early at the Ultimate Piaffe and did not see anyone at first. After several minutes, Carol and the vet tech appeared with the Equitainer containing my semen. Carol handed it to me and asked, "Did you meet the boys?" Well, no, I had not thought it would be proper to go poking around in her barn without her there. "Would you like to meet them?" Oh yes! I had hoped to see the stallions but had assumed they would have them tucked away somewhere, away from, well, people who might drive up and decide to go poking around in their barn. Carol directed me to the end of the barn aisle where both Ideal and Inbegriff stood in their stalls. |
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If you have never heard of Ideal, if you don't know what a fantastic sporthorse sire he is, then you must not be an Oldenburg person. According to the breeding statistics of the Oldenburg N.A. Registry, Ideal has sired more Premium foals (scoring 8.5 or higher at their inspections) than any other stallion. In the past seven years, only fourteen foals presented to the registry have scored a 9.0 or higher on movement. An incredible seven of those foals were sired by Ideal. For anyone needing remedial math, that means half the total number of foals receiving this prestigious movement score were Ideal foals. So for me, meeting Ideal was like meeting a celebrity. There he was, twisting his ears and biting at the air like any bored horse, and I got to go up and scratch him on the nose.
Both of them... Ideal and his son Inbegriff... were stunning. Looking at them was looking at perfect conformation, in the flesh, right there in front of me. They knew it, too. So while they may have been behaving like any other horse, there was something about them that said, we are Stallions, and we know it!
The next day when I returned the Equitainer, I did not find anyone in the barn. Of course I had to sneak down and visit with Ideal and Inbegriff again, just for a moment. I left a note for Carol on the white board to let her know where I had left the Equitainer and stepped back to look at it - my note - there on the white board at the Ultimate Piaffe. Their own notes were like the notes at any barn; lists of which horses needed to get out that day and who needed a new fly mask. Cool.
I am getting ahead of myself though. Half of this foal is Inbegriff's, but the other half is Miss Dolphin's. And of course in between my two trips to the Ultimate Piaffe was a long drive up to Washington to visit Dolphin and deliver the semen. |
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back to Isabelle ~ on to not sex |
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