"She didn't really look fat... she just had a belly. Her ribs were showing and her muscles all rippled under her coat as she moved around yesterday." I narrowed my eyes at the thought that a pregnancy might be possible.
"No, she just hasn't been exercised in awhile. My mind must be playing tricks on me and I'm making this into a bigger deal than it is. She's always been built a little strangely. Plus the timeline doesn't work out anyway because I got her between Halloween and Thanksgiving... right? Crap, I don't remember. How long ago was that?" I mused silently.
I couldn't go back to sleep.
"Okay so we're in the middle of June, let's say I got her in early November. November, December, January, February, March, April, May, June. See that's only eight months! But, well, what if she is pregnant and I won't admit it and she doesn't get the right care? Crap! I better email Linda and ask if she even has a stallion. She probably doesn't even have a stud on the property and I'm just being paranoid." I got out of bed quietly so as to not disturb Teri and padded into the office to shoot off an email.
I tried to word it tactfully so it came off as breezy and unconcerned, but it was early and I'm not sure how successful I really was.
"Hey there!
Just thinking about you and wondering how you're doing.
Also, I was wondering, do you happen to have any stallions on your property?
Hope you guys are great!
Yours, Ashleigh"
Then I told myself that there wasn't anything else I could do except wait for Linda to write back. I had a lot to get done that day, as it was the day of our long-awaited housewarming party.
I obsessively checked my email that morning and thankfully Linda responded quickly.
"Hi
How are you and Rose. We are doing fine.
Not much news. Things are pretty much the same as always. We would like to sell the place and move to NM but that has not happened yet.
I have a black Percheron Stallion.
Do you know of someone wanting to have babies?
I hope you guys are great!
Linda"
My heart jumped into my throat. Noooo, this couldn't be possible. Just because she has a stallion doesn't necessarily mean that Rose was pregnant... but if she was, the sire was a PERCHERON?! Seriously? Yikes. Okay. This warrants more sleuthing.
"New Mexico definitely has some gorgeous land, that would be really nice to have some property out there.
Rose and I are doing well, I haven't been able to ride much lately because I had surgery but I'm hoping I can start again next week.
The reason I asked about a stallion is, and well this is embarrassing so try to bear with me, because since I haven't been riding, Rose has gained some weight but it's all in her belly so I wanted to ask if she was exposed to the stallion and I haven't had her long enough to rule out a pregnancy. I figured that I should at least ask, just in case it's a possibility that she's pregnant so I can take the right care of her.
I know it's a little off the wall but I thought I'd be safe. Other than the fat belly she's just wonderful. My parents finally got to meet her and I think it's a good thing my mother doesn't have horse property or else she'd probably horse-nap her.
Any new horses or anything out there?
Thanks!
Ash"
More waiting. I should probably mention that at this point, I still haven't said anything to Teri about the possibility of a foal in our future. I purchased Rose in a very underhanded way and only managed to mention her to Teri the day before she was delivered to the stables, after the damage had been done. Teri was less than thrilled with me. In fact she's probably still less than thrilled with me. I'm shocked she's still married to me, most days. The last thing I wanted to do was bring it up and cause problems if there wasn't an actual problem to be had.
"WOW! I hope she is not with child, but I can not guarantee she is not. You know how things go. We had a lady take care of the place and she did have some of the horses get loose Rose was one of them and she could have been exposed to the stallion. I would say not if you had asked me from the start , but since I was not there when the horses got out I can not tell you she did not get covered.
I also had a paint /perch cross baby that could have been old enough to breed her, unlikely but maybe.
Maybe you should think about having her checked.
I am glad your mom liked Rose.
Sorry
Linda"
Well. There's the answer. My heart squirmed a little ways further up my throat. I tried to gulp it down but I was choking on the lumpy fact that I was going to have to try and explain to poor Teri that we might be having a baby. Which would bring our number of horses to 3, two of which were not approved. Teri had been out all morning running errands while I attempted to finish painting the bathroom doorframe. She had text messaged me not too long before I received that last email saying that she was bringing Chipotle home for lunch. My mouth was running dry with a slight panic over how she was going to take it and that we might have yet another mouth to feed on a single income.
Before I had too much time to completely destroy my courage, Teri walked through the door. I smiled at her and we sat down on the couch to eat. I downed some of the soda and opened my burrito wrapper but just couldn't bring myself to eat.
"Hey, so... I kinda have something I want to tell you but I want you to know that I did not know about this, I didn't try to have it happen and I'm already really sorry..." I trailed off.
Teri spiked an eyebrow at me. "What, you didn't have somebody give you another horse or something, did you?" She laughed at what she thought was a joke. My eyes betrayed me, they flashed surprise and then guilt as her jaw dropped.
"You must be kidding me. Ashleigh-" her tone was warning and a little angry.
"Well not exactly but kind of yes-in-the-way-that-a-young-horse-grows-in-a-mother-horse's-belly-it-turns-out-that-Linda-accidentally-sold-me-two-horses! Maybe." I finished in a rush.
I honestly have no idea what was running through Teri's mind as I said what I had to say. Slowly her face changed from anger to surprise to reluctant acceptance and finally her sense of irony kicked in. She threw her hands up in the air and laughed hopelessly.
This was not what I expected but I took it.
"What... how... WHAT?" Teri had reached the point that I hit in bed, early that morning. I explained everything to her and recounted my correspondence with Linda as well as my opinions and observations and what questions I still had.
"Okay, yeah, it sounds like we might be having a baby I guess. Shit." Teri looked down at her lunch, half uneaten. We had come so far in the previous five minutes that it was hard to believe that we were still sitting on that damn couch, trying to finish our food.
We sat in silence as we choked down what was left on our plates and finished off the soda.
"So how do we tell if she actually is pregnant?" Teri asked.
"I'm not really sure, I'm going to call Catherine." I pulled out my phone and started dialing my good friend Catherine, who was a horse vet that I used to work for and now lives in Casa Grande.
"Hey Catherine, so I have a weird question. How do you tell if a mare is pregnant late into her gestation?"
"Uh, you could always just try poking her belly - sometimes it'll poke you back! That'd be an easy way to tell." she laughed. I explained our predicament again and once more recounted what Linda had told me and what I had noticed the night before. Catherine agreed that I needed to go back out to the barn and do a little more detective work around Rose, check for signs of pregnancy that I wasn't looking for the night before.
Naturally, that night was our housewarming party so I wasn't going anywhere til Saturday. We told our friends about our potentially pregnant horse and pointed out the irony of the two of us having an unexpected pregnancy.
Saturday morning I got up and we had a lot of cleaning to do around the house. By afternoon it was just too hot to convince myself to go outside and I was still less than a week out of my surgery and I was pretty beat.
Saturday evening we drove out to the barn to visit Rose. I walked up to her stall and greeted her. Teri walked up behind me.
"Holy crap she's big!"
"Yeah... now you see what I mean." I replied grimly.
I opened the gate to her stall and closed it behind Teri. I walked to Rose's side and crouched down to look at her udders. Sure enough, they were swollen up. I groaned and sighed.
"Udders are swollen up."
I glanced under her tail and her vulva was slightly swollen and looked larger than normal. I stood close at Rose's side and placed the palms of my hands flat on the underside of her large belly.
It only took a few seconds to feel that very first, earthshattering movement across the floor of her abdomen. Teri stood on her other side and mimicked my hand placement.
"Oh my god I feel it moving!" she exclaimed to me over Rose's back. I grinned back at her.
"I know, I feel it too!"
For a few minutes we simply stood with Rose in silence, letting the waves of truth crash over our unsuspecting heads. What did this mean for us? Could we even hope to afford taking care of yet another horse? We would need to move her into a different stall and get it all ready. How far along was she? Was she going to pop that night or would it be another month or two? Was the baby going to be okay since we hadn't been doing any prenatal care? My head was filled with questions to which I had no answers.
I found the barn manager (Nancy, for future reference) and explained our situation to her. She was very sympathetic and helped us decide on a stall to turn into a foaling stall for Rose. She looked at her udders and her vulva and exclaimed that she thought Rose was going to give birth very, very soon. Immediately, that put me into a panic. She can't give birth yet, there's not a safe place for the baby to be born! We put Rose into the stall that would become the foaling stall and immediately sped off to Lowe's to purchase plywood planks to line the stall with. We had to buy plywood, zip ties, get the tools we'd need to prepare the stall, figure out something for bedding, buy supplies for a foaling emergency kit and countless other things I felt I didn't have time for.
The awesome people at Lowe's let us race in there 1 minute before closing and buy sheets of plywood and then even cut them for us. Then we went home and explained the whole thing to Berto and he agreed to come out and help Teri with the stall while I ran to Walgreen's to build my foaling kit.
A couple of hours later, we had plywood planks installed (to prevent baby legs from getting stuck in railings and breaking, and to stop baby from laying on its side and scooting outside of the stall), a bale of grass hay spread on the ground since we couldn't find straw at 9 pm on a Saturday night and a Tupperware container full of iodine, bandages, gloves, vetwrap and athletic tape, ready for the foal to come.
This photo was the first photo taken of Rose in her new foaling stall. Obviously it's a poor quality picture but you can see her big pregnant belly.
Petrified that the foal was going to be born that night, Teri and I had brought our camping mats and sleeping bags and supplies to stay the night at the barn in the bed of my truck. Finally by 11 pm we were ready to go to sleep. We shut the lights off and settled into our makeshift bed in the truck.
Every movement from Rose was amplified not only by our heightened senses unable to sleep, but also by the dry and scratchy hay covering the ground. I'm almost positive that neither of us slept more than two hours that night.
Dawn arrived early the next morning and brought with it flies, birds, and the sounds of the horses around us awakening and calling for their breakfasts. I sat bolt upright in the bed of the truck and looked toward the stall, expecting to see eight legs instead of Rose's four.
No such luck. Rose walked over to her water barrel and gulped down a few mouthfuls of cool water and then looked straight over at us and whinnied.
"Good morning to you too, Rose." Teri mumbled from under a sleeping bag.
Night number 1 had passed us by.
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