No baby...

It's the most wonderful and anxiety ridden time of the year. I'm so excited to be in the middle of it, but at the same time ready to be on the other side as well. I was doing great with waiting patiently until all the new foal posts on social media. Being as most of my friends are POA breeders, they are the cutest little spotted babies. That sure made the waiting for our own little bundles of joy a lot harder. Then it started to seem like EVERYONE was having babies and not us yet. In general we don't start expecting foals until the end of April, but this year we had two mares that took on the first breeding cycle and were due on the 19th and 25th of March. Notice I say, "were" due. Here we are at days 357 and 351 and still no babies. So what does that look like for a breeder?

Well, if you're having foals this early in Minnesota, that means you have to have the breeding stalls ready. You want to start putting your mares in a couple of weeks before their due date so they get acclimated to stall life. So this year breeding means a lot of shavings and pellets coming home from the store in shiny bags and heading out to the field in messy wheelbarrow fulls. We started putting mares in at night on the 9th and somewhere around two weeks ago - in full time where we could keep an eye on them. With China being a maiden - all bets are off on the "signs" of labor. Maidens are tricky beasts.

The other day I watched a video, almost 14 minutes long mind you, of a gal that had recorded herself making the baby checks each night. Every night she would traipse out to the barn, peek in the stall and say into the camera "no baby". If I remember the dates correctly, the video was a compilation of videos from April 18th to May 11th before the final video where she finally peeks in and the mare is in labor. I can relate to said video. I'm not gonna lie, I fast forwarded to the good stuff - the baby coming, but unfortunately that is not real life. I can't fast forward through the night checks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyfXZyJtPIw

However at least I was finally able to get cameras for the stalls. It's not quite as bad as that poor lady, layering up to head out into the snow and cold 3-4 times every night. Running through the rain drops or tripping over piles of mud in the dark. Trying to fall back asleep when you get back in is impossible after those nightly checks. That was us the last two years. This year, it is usually a lot less of a process. It's so much easier now to roll over, check my phone and go back to sleep. Except when the camera isn't working like last night. Yep, last night was a bundle up and check on everyone in the rain kind of night at 2:00 am. Have I been up since 2:00 am? Yes, mostly. Am I exhausted again today? Yep. Pretty much. That's mostly because of two nights ago though.

Two nights ago I went to sleep around 10:00. At 11:30 I woke up randomly and checked cameras. China was laying flat in her side- tail out, looking at her side. Then rolled up to sternal, back flat again, etc…. I've checked the cameras so many times over the last few weeks to see them just eating or sleeping that it took a while for my sleep muddled brain to register. When it did I went into straight panic mode. “OMG! Here we go!” I woke up Tim to make sure I wasn't overreacting and he agreed that we were game on. We woke up the girls to tell them to watch the cameras and come out if they wanted to see her baby be born before heading out to the barn. We tried to go in quietly, turned the lights on and China popped up and started eating. Ugh. I couldn’t go back to sleep until 1:30 and my alarm went off at 4:00. She’s currently dozing standing up in her stall as I type this after two relatively sleepless night. She's not even sorry.

I know that she and Cher can't wait forever. I know that eventually those babies will be born. I realize that mares have been known to go as long as 365 (or as my friend Jess shared - 370) days. I hope that for both of their sakes nature takes pity on them. Cher no longer wants to even come out of her stall for her daily walk and roll time. She sleeps most of the day and night. China is also spending more time than I've ever seen sleeping as well. On turn out she groans and meanders around. This is a mare that took great delight in bucking and tearing around before. This morning she went to roll and it was so comical, but sad in a way. Her front legs started to bend towards the ground and you could see she had a moment where she was trying to reconsider her choice to roll. However, when you get that much land whale moving towards the ground there isn't any stopping it. She had no choice but to just flop onto the ground. She made two half hearted attempts to roll over (didn't make it) and then laid there contemplating the monumental effort it was going to take to get all that weight back upright again. Anyone who has been overdue before can relate to how "done" these two are with being pregnant. As I've been saying for two weeks now - any day now we will have babies!