Horse Sense

When I was in elementary school—primarily in the 1st~4th grades—there was this girl who was batty about horses. She talked about horses, drew pictures of horses, and if I remember correctly, even had a horse-themed lunchbox! And while me and my friends were out playing war, me leading my squad in action against the nefarious enemy led by a boy I called ‘Squinty-Eyes,’ killing each other in dramatic fashion with our trusty forefingers, this girl and her group of friends (fillies?) would be prancing around the playground like horses, making whinnying sounds, pawing in the dirt, and otherwise looking silly. As this was pre-Monty Python and the Holy Grail, all they were missing was Patsy to go behind them banging coconuts together to make hoof noises.
But I digress…..
Naturally, Joyce and I didn’t get along too well either. I’m not sure why, as it is not as if our fingers could kill their imaginary horses, though we often tried to drill their pretty (or so I imagine) ponies between the eyes as they blithely pranced through our kill zones. Had I been more clever at the time, I could have made some witty comment, like, ‘Oh, poor horsey! It looks like it’s getting a bad case of lead poisoning! BANG BANG! Haha!’ But as clever was an adjective that was rarely used when referring to me, I am sure I just crassly yelled out, ‘BANG! Your horse is D-E-A-D! Hahahahahahahhahahahahaha!’
And I will add that a decade later I happened to be back in that town, and what did I espy in the newspaper? A picture of Joyce, sitting pertly on a horse, basking in the limelight as Walla Walla’s newly crowned rodeo queen! Which just goes to show you that even crazy people can sometimes succeed in reaching their dreams!

So anyway, I told you the above to help you understand the below…..

You see, Ally makes Joyce appear positively sane by comparison.
Ally has been on this horse kick (no pun intended) for at least a month now. And it’s only getting worse. There is this cartoon on TV called Horseland, and, sadly, Cindy has been able to get DVDs of it from the library. And I ask you, how many times can a little girl watch the same DVD without tiring of it? Answer: I’ll let you know—at this time I only know that 20 times is not enough. (It only takes 2 showing to drive a Daddy to thoughts of self-immolation…)
She also goes around on all fours as much as possible.
And she has developed a whinny that can rip bark off of trees.
Fortunately, she is a house-trained. When she walks up to me with her legs assuming the ‘I gotta go to the bathroom real bad’ position and asks for assistance, once I try to hurry to the bathroom before the dam breaks, she then plops down on her hands and knees and s-l-o-w-l-y canters towards the bathroom, as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. Good taste prohibits me from mentioning the similarities between her and horses found in their respective bathroom behaviors. Let’s just say that when we were in the Smoky Mountains and she was on a horse carriage ride and the horse did both a #1 and #2 literally right before her eyes, she was enthralled. Way TOO enthralled! And she had Cindy take a ton of pictures of all the horsies in their stalls.


It’s amazing how long a blog post can be when one is sitting the backseat of a car during a business trip with nothing better to do!