all the bedtime stories sound like warnings

Our new foal is pretty clueless. Like all new babies, he likes to chew on things as his teeth come in, and every once in a while he'll take a bigger chew than society deems acceptable. The welts on my stomach and shoulder can attest to this, and he just barely caught my just-recently-broken-and-wrongly-healed finger in his strong little teeth. The shriek this poorly planned move elicited sent him skipping and whirling across the round pen, and I swear he was laughing. The little shnitzel.

The little sucker isn't named yet, sadly, and we've been fishing around for something that fits him perfectly, that will immediately give any newcomer a correct impression of his character and temperment. Dad says that we also have to give him a name that, if we have to sell him, won't scare buyers off. Unfortunately, this rules out Trouble, Mischief, Scalawag, El Diablo, or my personal favorite, Spawn of Satan. Grandpa calls him Rastus (not a complementary name--they don't get along well ever since the little bugger took a hefty nip out of the tail of grandpa's coveralls). Amanda wants to call him Alf, but I don't think that this gives an accurate feel. I'm sticking with Rascal for now. That's nuetral enough, right?

But he is a cute little devil. Even though he's losing his baby hair.

He's also getting ready to lose his mom to a rare form of cancer, which horses typically never get. That's one of the reasons he's such an imp, is that she's not feeling well enough to nip him and set him straight when he's acting rambuctious. So when I try to warn him away from biting, my heart's not really in it. I watch him nuzzle up to her and fall asleep leaning against her side in the sunshine, and I know he's just a little horse, but they feel loss too. And my heart aches for him.