Today I saw the foal’s heart beating on the sonogram

The vet came today to do a 30 day check on Cori’s pregnancy (again, she is bred to Beart 411 via frozen semen). The fetus was a little blob with two arm-like vestiges on each side of the blob. The “arms” appeared segmented. In fact, this was the backbone and the segments were vertebrae. In the middle of the blob we could see a teeny heart beating. I have to say, this made me grin from ear to ear. A pregnancy is not considered “settled” until Day 75, but so far this looks pretty good. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

We did a heat check on Dahlia. She is not yet in heat. I want to try her one more time with the frozen semen from Onne 376. But it looks like that will be later this month. Possibly even in early August.

I had almost given up on breeding Tara. After all, I want to use a US stallion for her and most stallion owners do not ship after July 31. The vet checked Tara and she registered at 44cm. Her mom has been ovulating at 46 which could mean this mare might ovulate in a day or two – and I still had not even chosen a stallion! I frantically sat and tried to decide what to do. After all, money is getting really tight now with all this breeding. I decided to go for it and rang up one of my favorite stallion farms – Iron Springs in PA. They have a few stallions (all good). Maybe they would have some left over semen from today’s collection. Megan, the stallion manager luckily had some semen from Meinse 439 that was available. That was kinda a miracle and I already knew he was a great match for Tara and on my list of possible choices for her. Long story short, the container is now with Fed Ex and we’ll breed tomorrow. Wow!

By the way, I am rather embarrassed and ashamed of myself for calling a stallion manager on a Monday afternoon asking for semen (they generally collect Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings). This is horribly unfair and disrespectful to the managers. It gives them no time to plan, and it is quite likely they cannot help you. In other words, my lack of planning was causing Iron Springs staff to jump through hoops. Not a nice thing to do. The stallion managers have a tough job and they are greatly under appreciated. Megan, if you are listening out there is cyberland, thank you for being willing and able to help me. Iron Springs is very lucky to have you.