Stud visit

This morning we drove over to East Sussex to visit a stud we're thinking of using for the boys. It's a small but well formed and peaceful place nestling in the Ashdown forest, well set up with adjustable dummy (and rather alarmingly set to "large" when we saw it - not used to giant horses any more), mare stocks and fully equipped processing lab for semen and embryo transfer. For us this is perfect and a minor inconvenience that it's a good hour away and longer with a trailer on the back, but we can get around that by offering only frozen semen. I notice plenty of stallions are available only with AI/frozen so the next stage will be to have them trained to the dummy and to see if they will indeed freeze. The training normally takes around 10 days. I'm not wild about the boys being away from home but in this case needs must given that none of us know what we're doing, but I'd be happy to leave them in the stud's care.

One of the downsides of them having such a nice life coming and going as they please at home is that things would be quite different when they have to go away. However they could have a half day turnout and ad lib haylage so I think that is not too shabby.  The next stage is the numerous biohealth checks that need doing; Coggins, EVA, EIA etc, not to mention getting T right. Luckily we have established that none of this requires a pre-ejaculatory sample: I had visions of me parading up and down with very excited stallions next to the mares' field, waving a receptacle in the direction of their fifth leg and hoping for the best.

While there we met Millenium, a GP dressage stallion who was absolutely MAHOOSIVE. Got a crick in my neck looking up at him but he was a real sweetie. I forgot horses came that big, being so accustomed to my Iberian pocket rockets.

Meanwhile the bellies are waxing and Alfama looks like a small planet, with a horse's head, neck and legs sticking out. We have to get the CCTV set up asap and I am trying to keep myself to a pleasant simmer at the prospect of our very first baby arriving Really Quite Soon. Argh. Argh.