Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Introduction

About a year ago I met a guy named Mike Kelly from Waterford Works, NJ. Mike is an engineer by day and trains and breeds horses on the side.  We became friends by starting a Facebook group called Quarter Horse Tales: the Long & Short of It. As a group we arranged the purchase of Wimpy P-1's original registration papers for their donation to the AQHA Museum in Amarillo. My daughter even went over and rode with him while she was on a trip to Philadelphia, PA. While there she saw a foal by Mike's horse Boon Docs Freckles, named Lil Miss Maybelline (aka Mabel). At the time I thought she was cute and it wasnt until I saw a pic of her full sister that I really took notice. I studied her pedigree and noticed that on the topside she had Colonel Freckles, Boon Bar, Great Chance and John Berry. As well,  I'd seen Mike ride some nice horses by him and really liked the look of Boon Docs Freckles. On the bottom side she was out of an own daughter of Crockett Gay Bar, a good son of Gay Bar King, and went back to King many times on the bottom side. Here is a link to her pedigree: http://www.allbreedpedigree.com/lil+miss+maybelline

So, based on all that information I knew I had to have Mabel for myself and 13 year old daughter Megan for us to show at the Stock Horse Shows down here in Texas. The idea with this blog is to document her progress and training with words, pictures and video. I've trained and shown lots of horses but I've never documented the process and thought this would be something that might help others as to what a process training and developing a horse is really like and share with our friends. Besides, we are regular people with jobs and other commitments and we do not have a fancy arena and facility that makes this process challenging much like most people that have horses and might consider taking something like this on as a possible endeavor.

There will be guest blogs from Megan and her breeder, Mike Kelly, from time to time to add background and add some flavor to this blog. I hope you enjoy following our journey....