Survived taking 13 year old twins to Shamrock

These are excellent, well behaved kids by general standards.  They asked a few times if they could help in some way and were polite and did what they were told.

But I have no experience dealing with kids or even supervising adults so I am not good at setting out tasks continually and I found out that even great kids are not self starters who just look around and do things that haven't been done yet or keep something like 'scatter the horse poop' done w/o reminders. 

So it was some extra stress for me at times but overall I had a fun weekend too.   The kids had a blast,  the girl has always wanted to go horse camping and figured it would never happen because they don't have a truck and trailer (and horses original owner either gets too nervous or too sentimental/bittersweet seeing him with kid or is just too selfish to even go a short distance out of her way to haul them to join her on a day ride near home)  I hauled Lady up too and the boy really had a blast riding her.   He has a great natural seat and 'this is fun' when Lady would jump the creeks to stay with the herd.  I have had Lady across water but haven't worked with her recently and she was putting her priss on or something.  

My dad enjoyed himself too.   We skipped this ride last year, after I had planned to go up because I didn't think Sadie was ready for the longer ride and our neighbor that almost always does our chores was taking a trip that weekend so it just didn't feel like a good idea to go.    I know dad was really looking forward to going because he had most of his packing done a day ahead of time and he tends to procrastinate on the packing task.

I still decided Sadie was not ready for the LD again this year.  Well I thought she could probably do the LD one day but she might get a little leg sore and not be able to go out and do the the fun rides and then dad and the kids might have problems getting herd bound Razz and Lady to go out w/o Sadie.    It was very hot this year and I was feeling fairly wilty so I was kind of glad I was not riding 30 miles and very relieved that I was not doing the 55 mile ride any of the days.

I also found out that while Sadie is getting much better about anxiety of being around strange horses she is probably going to have some race brain.  She really wanted to catch up if she saw other horses in front of her.   So doing the fun ride at just under 4 mph rather than entering the LD and having to keep up 5mph to finish on time and having all that adrenalin from the other horses was a good thing and she got lots of practice crossing water,  going through draws and stuff.     Easyboot gloves stayed on and she did not get sore.  I still need to find a great farrier but at least I know the fall back option will work OK.