A 'Shocker' of a morning!

If any of you have been following me moaning and groaning with these miniature horses you'll be glad to know that lo and behold Annie was indeed pregnant! I hadn't been out yet this morning when my dad called my house and told me to look out the window into the pasture. There in the tall grass was a teeny head sticking out standing next to his mom! I literally tripped over my own feet running out to check.

Boy.

Ah nuts. Now I have to wait until next year and hope for a girl. I was hoping for a girl so she'd keep her momma company in a seperate paddock. Now I'll have to keep him seperate from his mom and him from his dad. His daddy wasn't too happy to see him this morning LOL.

In April I built a 12'x12' box stall for Annie. It was -10 here that day, i put rubber padding on the floor, bedded it knee deep with straw and got all her feed, minerals and water in the pen. Wala! Now I waited. And waited. And waited. She had wax on her teats and her belly dropped. Her mammary VEINS going to her udder were swollen and her vulva was starting to swell. All signs. I knew it. So I lost sleep for numerous days getting up at mindight, 3:30am and 5:30am to check. Nothing. Just standing there.

UGH!

After a week, a vet visit and a ferrier visit, I put her back in the larger pen for exercise. First week of May. Same story. Same scenerio. I was beginning to think that I had done this all before. It sure seemed familiar!

As of last week I declared a 'no foal' year and put her back with Carlyn in hopes he might get the mark this year. She didn't have any swelling in her mammary veins anymore, her belly didn't look as full and her vulva could have passed for a yearlings. So I put them, the ram, and the three registered pygmy bucks out into the pastures in the evening hours. The last few nights I left them out all night long, but they were able to come back into the barn if alarmed.

And then when I had given up and moved on. BAM! Here comes this guy. My dad thought it was a filly and named her Summer. My Grandpa said 'Surprise' and I said, yea he sure was a shocker to me. And there ya have it. His name!

Tentatively he will be called White Pine's Morning Shocker, but we'll call him Shocker. If he was anymore like his dad (sassy, stubborn, bratty) I'd have thought I was looking at his Daddy as a foal.

Will keep you posted on this little guy as he grows up. As most foals do, they shed their foal hair and get their mature hair in later in the year. We'll see what color he sheds into.

And this is what my llama Ty thought about the newborn! (the baby was to the left of the photo if you couldn't tell ha ha!)