Spiders, Hawks and Horses

The two year old came running out of the play room this morning, yelling to me that there was a spider down there.  I told him to squish it.  He was gone for a little while, then he brought me his teddy bear and asked me, "Can you help the bear squish the spider?" Lol.  My brave little man.

 On the way to see where the spider was, I found the five year old with a library book.  He had found the page of sticker dots that we had used to label Sadie a few weeks ago - each sticker has a horse part on it, and these were all the things that were more difficult.  We just labeled the easy stuff.  Anyway, thankfully the library is covered in a protective plastic ... which will make removing the stickers much easier - ha.

 We had a hawk hunting our gophers today.  It was right outside the window.  Such a great view.  This first picture was taken with my phone.  I had to run upstairs to get my camera for better pictures.

It was pretty cool to see the gophers' response.  This was the only one I could see anywhere.  We usually have at least 10 visible at once.  He knew exactly where that hawk was at all times - even when the hawk flew way up high and over the field in front of our house.  That's around 800 yards.

Yesterday the five year old had another riding lesson.  He was much more cooperative than he has been in the past.  It was the first time the kitty came out to the arena.  We used to have a cat that looked a lot like this one.

 When it was time to get on the horse he was ready to get right on.

Each week they have an activity to do while on horseback.  This week they had poles with colored cones on them.  Each cone had a ring on it in a different color.

They had to take the ring and ride the horse around the circle until they found a cone that matched their ring, and then put it on the cone.

 He did really well with matching the colors.

Riding the horse nearly put him to sleep though.  It must have been the rocking motion because he shouldn't have been tired at all.  But at one point they were having to hold onto him because his eyes were completely closed.  He seemed really out of it to me - not himself.  Not sure why, but I found this a little unsettling.

At the end, Sadie gets a treat - a grain mix.  He got to hold the bucket for her.