With babies, you just never know what you’re going to get.

When I acquired Baby T-Rex (there on the right)

I had

No

IDEA

I was going to get a dinosaur sized show pony.

There is a REASON we call her Baby T-Rex. She’s somewhere between 17 & 18 hands and I absolutely refuse to measure her to find out how close she may be to the higher number.

I stopped measuring when she reached 17 hands by Three.

Her little brother on the other hand has come out on the opposite end of the spectrum.

And while Baby T got EONS of “baby horse training”, road sides, trail rides, farm animals,

field trips, flags and tarps………………

I haven’t had that kind of free time this year for her little brother Veloci-T .

So while he got some of that fun stuff as a 2 yr old,

now that he’s turning 4 he has mostly just been “tossed into the program.”

Due to this overall lack of extra time his first ever show was basically his first ever cross country school.

Heck, why not?!

My first pleasant surprise was his relative apathy about 15 strange horses in the warm up arena.

Let’s count that as a “first ever”. I’ve never taken a baby or new horse to a show for the first time where the warm up didn’t at least somewhat blow their mind.

This kid…..handled the completely insane (& terrifying) warm up ring with an apparent shrug.  He trotted around quietly as I watched Intermediate horses spook sideways across the ring & I took note of all the pros riding with neck straps.

The baby?

Not concerned at all.

This was his very first time in a dressage arena and he did give the “Ring One” sign a bit of a side eye. A passerby commented, “Like he’s never seen that before.” I had to laugh because she was assuming he was a typical knucklehead spooking at something he’s seen a zillion times. But this really was his first dressage ring and it was a remarkably subdued response for all his “firsts.”

His dressage test wasn’t a world beater, but we stayed in the ring, he picked up both his canter leads, and there was no bucking or rearing.

I can’t say that about some of my older horses who started their dressage tests by rearing and bolting away from the judge’s stand.

His show jumping was no less than perfect.

He didn’t look at anything, didn’t spook at anything and jumped all the little flowers like he’d seen flowers before! He hasn’t.

Cross country was a bit more stressful as he did a little looky loo at the first handful of jumps but jumped all the things and we even made time by 2 seconds!

Yep, definitely the best Viper pilot in the fleet!

Baby T-Rex’s little brother Veloci-T is officially an event horse.

Hee hee hee hee.