Don't over-do it

ByLisa Moorhouse

So, I was getting overwhelmed about trying to blog post daily, and then I stopped posting all together. Even blogging is hard for me to balance! I find that I do this fairly often in my life, and I can’t be the only one, so I might as well open up about it.

I feel like everything I get in to I want to do the best I can, but I have super high expectations of myself and easily become overwhelmed. I started running, did a few 5k runs, that wasn’t enough, did a 25k, and still wanted more. I’m proud of my marathon, but training etc took a lot away from my riding which is supposed to be my main drive. I need to constantly remind myself that my best isn’t always what I could accomplish given the perfect circumstances, but what I can accomplish at this point in my life with the tools/time that I have. I can’t devote my life completely to rocking out one thing without letting the rest of those things in my life fall to the side. Obviously because of my family situation and the responsibilities that I have, this is not an option, ever. My daily goal is going to have to be constantly reminding myself of my human limitations and being proud of the progress I make!

The seasons are changing, I’m happy that the sun is shining, but at the same time I instantly get this weight knowing all that I have to do throughout the warm seasons to be where I want to be. Maybe I should start a group for all of us who struggle with this to remind each other daily that it’s ok not to be able to reach perfection. Being a perfectionist, an idealist, isn’t always a positive thing. I will survive, I am going to schedule time aside to Blog weekly. Hopefully I can be consistent without being overwhelmed, and I can blog more when something exciting happens without feeling like it’s too much.

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  • Corey's Birthday

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    Yesterday was Corey’s birthday! Hurray for 34! 😉 He thinks he is getting old but I’m convinced old is not a number but a state of mind. I fully intend to be riding my horses competitively into my 70’s.

    It was a super busy day for me, Corey loves a clean house so I did my best to clean up, but it’s a huge chore when the kitchen/front bathroom is under construction! I didn’t sit down for more than a few minutes the whole day! I spent the majority of my time working on getting the wallpaper border off of the bathroom so that we can hopefully paint soon, and wow is that a pain! There is even some of it still left to get off today.

    I had the kids make homemade birthday cards when they got home from school. They had fun drawing on them and using stickers to decorate. I probably spent the same amount of $ I would for 1 card from all of us, so I really liked this idea better. We had a yummy dinner and cake, of course! Since it was a Monday, Corey went to men’s group for church after dinner and the kids and I played a few games of Uno (or 1 really long game as when they won I let them come back in and play more). It was fun. I wish sometimes we weren’t as busy and we did stuff like that more often. It seems like there is always something going on, sports for me or the kids, errands, chores, construction projects, etc. It’s really nice to just say “that doesn’t matter” every once in a while and sit down and spend some good quality family time together. I love my kids! They were laughing and joking around, I can’t believe how much my girls have grown, playing Uno without much help and reading like rock-stars! Man has kindergarten changed them. <3

  • Sterilization Week

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like spending a load of money with the vet. Yesterday Bobbi left for his new home after getting his blood pulled for a new coggins, and a shot. We figured if the vet was imagecoming anyways we might as well get some other things done and pulled a coggins on everyone else and Sid the weanling pony got his shots and had a little surgery.

    Sid is now a gelding. Yay! 🙂 Abby was in the stall watching the event, I warned her she may not want to watch but she insisted. She didn’t seem to have any issues until closer to the end and we got a good shot of her yuck face. The vet was awesome and even explained things to us all, he was great with Abby (he also has young kids at home). I honestly think the 2 vets we have out from Equine Medical in Lowell are the best horse vets I’ve had. They are great with the horses and with us. When we moved from Lowell there were not a lot of options available to us here without a long distance farm call charge, and Equine Medical is the most expensive (It’s about a 70 mile round trip), but we stuck imagewith them because we really like them over everyone else we’ve had experience with.

    Sid looked dead for a while in his stall after, he was up and moving around though when the vet was ready to leave and he spent the night in the stall last night. Spoiled. He has a big stall all to himself, a bag full of hay, big bucket of water and has had grain 3x already. He still had a lot of hay this morning so he’ll probably be in there longer than the 24 hour prescribed stall rest just because he doesn’t seem bothered at all by having his food all to himself. I think if it were Dancer he’d be running circles in his stall, upset that no one else was inside with him, but Sid is happily munching away.

    From the horse vet yesterday to the dog vet this morning, Ellie got dropped off for her spay at 8am today. I ran out and dropped her off before Corey left for work so I wouldn’t have to drag the kids out first thing in the morning. She gets to spend the night there and we will pick her up tomorrow morning. It’ll be nice to have that done, I definitely don’t ever want to have to deal with a female dog in heat again. I don’t know how anyone can stand having a dog in their house during that. Yuck. Dealing with the doggy diapers was a pain on top of being gross, definitely not for me.

    So now every animal we own is sterilized except for Dancer, and of course the chickens. 😉

     

     

     

  • Sold!

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    Sold my husband’s horse today. It’s sad in ways, he’s a great horse and it’s hard not to get attached, but my husband doesn’t have the time or the urge to ride often enough to make it worth him having his own horse. With 4 riding horses I’m overwhelmed with needing to ride them all to keep them in shape, and since I’ve been training this year (end of summer until now) for the marathon I haven’t been riding nearly enough.
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    Bobbi used to be a show horse and now he’ll go back to that lifestyle and it’ll be good for him to get all the attention and work. While I don’t show myself, I know showing means your horse’s image matters and unhealthy horses don’t look good, so I won’t have to worry about him being taken care of. Also, he’s going to a little girl whose mom is buying him for her for Christmas. What an awesome Mom! So exciting, I have bought ponies for my kids before, but they don’t have the urge to ride yet and I’m waiting patiently for them to decide they got the horse bug! I’m excited to go see Bobbi and his girl when they go to fair next summer, Corey will pull out his big camera and thoroughly enjoy photographing the event I’m sure.

    He is still with us now but he’ll be leaving Monday. I’m glad they didn’t want to just take him today because my husband wouldn’t have gotten to say goodbye. He really did enjoy Bobbi and I’m sure he will miss him. Bobbi taught him how to ride and I love that.

    After Bobbi’s new owner left I did get to ride my mare Solace as well. It was a nice sunny day and not unbearably cold (this is huge for me!). She’s 6 and can be a pistol when we go to an endurance race, imagebut she hasn’t been ridden much this fall and she was an angel in the bosal today. I love how smart and trustworthy my Arabians are, they’ve had no special training, but at any age they seem to be able to retain everything they’ve learned even when they aren’t using it. This could also be bad obviously, if they’ve been taught bad manners, but mine have all been great fortunately.

    We only rode in the arena a couple of miles worth, about 20 minutes, because I didn’t want her to get sweaty. After we finished I let her eat some of the grass that we’re so fortunate to have still. This December has been warm, and while the mud was really bothering me, it was nice to not be shoveling snow and freezing the last few weeks! It’s almost as if Michigan was trying to convince me that it’s not so bad here.

     

  • Christmas 2014

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    I missed a few days in the Christmas rush! Corey was off Christmas Eve through Sunday, which was a huge blessing for our family, but it also meant a lot less downtime for me to get on the blog! Christmas Eve we brought our dog home from the vet after getting spayed and then we went and picked up Corey’s daughter that he hasn’t seen since September (insert long dramatic story). We went to lunch with my parents since her mom now lives over close to them, and then we went into Grand Rapids and let the kids play at Catch Air. We had planned something more exciting but plans don’t always go the way we want. Catch Air worked out great for the kids as they got to run around and play as much as they wanted until it closed at 4 and Analise’s mom picked her up from us. We got her a couple Christmas presents to take home, stuff she could use like a box set of young reader chapter books and a cute outfit. All the kids got along really well the whole day, which was huge, seems like with Analise not coming over as often it’s more like having a friend come play for the day.

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    Abby, Analise, Bella, and Eli on top of the inflatable slide

     

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    They were so done with shopping.

    After Analise’s mom picked her up we went over to the mall to get my iPhone fixed, somehow the center button had broken and fallen off during the day. We got my phone fixed, the kids got to play again in the play area at the mall, and we walked around and did some shopping. It was a really long day, but fun for the most part. I decided to try to get a cute holiday photo of the kids in front of the giant Christmas tree, but they were tired and not thrilled about getting their photos taken! Eli seems to be my most difficult photo child lately, can’t seem to get a good shot of him to save my life. He is definitely my son although most of the time he is a clone of his father.

    When we got home we opened our family presents and then Christmas morning the kids got their gifts from Santa. We spent Christmas day up in Big Rapids with my Sister’s family and my parents and it was a nice day even though my sister’s family has been a bit under the weather.

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    Abby and Bella with their Build A Bear buys.

    Fast forward to Sunday after church, more shopping! The girls each got a $10 gift card to Build A Bear in their stockings and Eli got $10 to spend so of course we had to spend it right away. 😉 It was another long morning of shopping (honestly not my favorite thing to do), but I think everyone was pleased
    at the end of it.

     

  • Sick of winter

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    Tonight we prep to get hit by another winter storm. I think everyone in Michigan is sick of it at this point. Bella is home from school with a headache that wouldn’t go away, had her drink a bunch of water and take a nap. Could we all just hibernate until spring? It’s cold and windy, I want to be outside riding the horses! Thankful at least for round bales as it makes our daily chore load a lot less when it’s 20 degrees.

    Shane was very full of it after being stalled overnight on the worst day.

    I’m struggling personally with the cold and lack of sunlight, fresh air! Just the thought of going out right now is depressing. I find that mostly these days people don’t care about others as much as they say they do, but sometimes sharing our struggles helps other people to know they aren’t alone in theirs. For all those struggling with getting through the last (hopefully) and hardest part of winter, I feel you! My horses feel it too I think. I love watching them play, even in the snow, but I know how much they love to run the big pastures and graze. We all are looking forward to the freedom we gain in the summer, long miles on wonderful trails, longer days and green grass. We can get through this. I have to do the self talk daily, “I will get through this, spring is close”. We’ve got this!

    Frodo with a snow blaze.

  • Catching up with Summer

    ByLisa Moorhouse

    I always think Summer is coming, I’m going to get so much done, etc., but that just doesn’t happen. My kids have been brutal so far this summer. My house is filled with the sounds of arguing sisters and bullying of their brother. Thankfully he loves to read so he can escape to a quiet place and avoid them. Even when we are outside they always seem to find something awesome to argue about like “she’s going down the wrong side of the driveway on her bike!”. Yikes! I know other moms out there understand this, but it just seems like this is the worst summer I’ve had for it. I am blaming them being at school all day long last year for making me not used to the constant noise, arguing, crying… and so on. As much as I hate the onset of winter and the cold that comes with it, I can’t wait for the start of the school year and hopefully my much happier kids!

    While my kids driving me insane is no excuse for not posting often, I will admit that by the end of the day, I just don’t want to. When the quiet comes I want to relax and just shut my brain off. Every time I get a good idea about something I want to post/rant about, I get sidetracked doing something else and never make it back over to my computer. The joys of being at home with your children, you very strongly resemble a person with severe ADHD.

    I feel bad when Corey gets home and the house isn’t shining in an extremely clean state, but deep down I know this is the real world and while some homes may seem that way (when people know you are coming over to visit), the reality is no one’s house can be that clean all the time and have children and pets (lets not forget the farm!). Speaking of, mowing 6 acres of pasture is a lot of work. Lazy work right, sitting on my butt, but it hurts my back and it’s sooo time consuming. An hour here and there at night when I can leaves me a lot less time for riding. My sanity is largely connected to my large herd beasts outside and I really need to up them in my priorities! Their care of course is at the top with the care of the kids, but riding requires another adult on location or else I’m stuck doing circles in the arena, which we’ve been doing a lot of lately.

    So yea, our summer has been good so far but I just don’t feel like I’m where I should be by now. I haven’t been running, not enough riding in my eyes, and the things around the house that I feel should be done just aren’t. Such is life I guess!

    Here’s hoping for more sanity, and updates to those who actually stop by the blog.

     

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