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August 02, 2005

silly singing

Petey, my little Paint Horse, has Equine Uveitis. That means his left eye has gone blind.
As those of you with horses know, we are trained to do everything from the left side of the horse, so mounting or getting off of Petey can be a bit ... exciting.
I have found, through trial and error, that singing nonsense songs to Petey calms him quite a bit. When I ride him, I sing to him - silly stuff - like "look at the pretty butterfly, Petey, look at the pretty bug" - mostly, I sing about where we are, I guess. Some people may think I'm nuts, but Petey never gets excited and bucks if I'm singing to him.

I was at the barn yesterday, to check his foot (he stepped on a nail last week and John pulled it from his frog) and play with him a bit and to get him to soak his foot in a bucket of epsom salts and water. I found that singing to him calmed him enough to keep his foot in the bucket for a good soak.

Of course, everyone in the barn thinks I'm crazy now, I guess.

When I was a little girl, I used to make up songs and sing them all the time - especially when walking through the lovely woods behind our house.

When Andy was little, I used to sing in an opera-like manner about silly stuff - like - I'm making dinner, what do you want? - only with one made up tune or another.

I guess I sing to the dogs and cats, too.

I have no idea what the point of this is - perhaps a confession that I'm a bit nutty, I suppose!

Posted by Beth at August 2, 2005 09:19 AM