“TAKE THAT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!”
Raquel has a lot of patience with Maddo
Any time you hear your wife say that you know it can’t be a Good Thing. Especially when the volume of her voice is such that you can practically see the CAPITALIZATION spilling out from her mouth and rolling around the corner of the stables and slamming into your face.
Oh yeah. The stables. Where the horses are kept. Not our horse, mind you. We can’t afford to purchase, never mind the associated costs of boarding, feeding, grooming, bathing and cleaning up after four-legs-and-a-tail’s-worth of glue in the making. We have two cats at home and keeping those feline beasts in fresh food and cat litter is expensive enough.
Now, as a dad, one of the things you find out when you have daughters is that they inevitably fall in love with the idea of having a pony. As I said before, owning a pony can be an expensive proposition.
But thanks to the good folks at Groupon, we were able to get a deal on a month of very basic beginner horse riding lessons for our older daughter, Maddo. She is only 3 years old, so the lessons are incredibly simple. She “learns” how to follow the instructions of her teacher, which brushes to use, what order in which to use them, how to go about putting the riding pad and saddle on the horse and, very importantly, how to safely behave around the horse so that she doesn’t get spooked and kick my little girl into the middle of next week.
I put “learns” in quotations because after what has now been two months of lessons, I have begun to wonder if Maddo’s brain works as well as your average pasta strainer trying to hold in water. The water can flow right through. What’s important is keeping the ravioli in the bowl. And when someone teaches Maddo to do something, I want her to hold on to that ravioli and do what she is told.
She does not always do what she is told.
