It’s official: the page has turned on the 2016 Fall chapter at the Barn. This past Monday not only marked the first morning our staff came shuffling in bundled up from head to toe (Except for me. In my stubborn denial that winter is around the corner, I will probably wear shorts until temperatures plunge south of freezing), but also the first week without riding lessons since August. Luckily, we still had a couple of camps and clinics, so the Barn wasn’t completely deprived of kids.
For the remainder of November and all of December, we plan on holding several camps. The camps will all be unmounted and vary from theme. For example, in the “Pioneer camp”, students will make their own butter and flatbread as well as learn how to square dance. Other camps include arts & crafts, a pajama day, and even a birthday party for all of our horses. Click here if you’re interested in learning more about the camps.
It will take some time for us to adjust to not having our students here on a regular schedule. Horses have also rotated to being in the barn overnight and out in their pastures during the day. That means the stalls are a mess when we arrive in the morning. Even with four or five staff members here, it can take a couple hours to have all sixteen stalls cleaned and rebedded. However, that does make things much easier in the evening, as now all we have to do is dump feed and bring the horses back into the barn.
We’re still hammering out the schedule, but we’re planning on having some students come out for riding lessons starting in January. It can be tricky though. We don’t have a crystal ball telling us which days will be too cold to ride. If the temperature is below freezing, we don’t want to push our students or horses through such miserable conditions. On those days, we may try to do an indoor ground lesson or even cancel the lesson altogether due to the weather. But that’s life when you live in a climate with four seasons. We enjoy having our kids here no matter how hot or cold it is, and work our hardest to ensure they always have fun and learn something.
There will still be plenty of activity and good times at the Barn over the Winter. For example, the Barn Christmas Party/White House Open House will be on Saturday, December 17th. We hope to see many of you there, and wish you all warmth and wellness as we enter these colder months!
-Connor