My Kingdom for a Horse!

Joelle writes >>>”What if your child has a career goal in mind and you have no idea where to begin, or how to find the resources?  Her goal is to be a wrangler at summer camp as soon as she’s eligible (around age 17).  The job is an absolute perfect fit for her.  One problem – she needs to keep up her horsemanship and learn stable management skills…  but… the horse?  My kingdom for a horse!  It looks impossible.  How does one achieve the impossible?!?”<<<

I have been in that exact situation!  My son is a gifted piano player, and for the longest time he learned to play using an 50 year old console piano with no music stand, hopelessly out of tune!  It wasn’t until Alex won the full tuition scholarship that we could afford to buy him a nicer piano (a very small baby grand.)  Of course, at this point he’ll be leaving home soon, and the piano is merely a way of luring him back home on a regular basis!

If you simply can’t afford something (as we couldn’t for about a decade) then you can do two things.  You can look for it in other ways:  ask friends, neighbors, at church and work and community events, until you can find a reasonable substitute.  We did that.  Asked everyone we knew if they had a way to get a good piano.  It never happened but it was worth a try.

So we moved on to the second strategy – finding a mentoring situation that had what we needed.  Try googling about horses, equestrian-something, and ranches.  Ask with a local vet!  In other words, pursue the activities, the passion of her interests, and not necessarily the piano…. errr.. I mean HORSE!  Find activities for her to do with horses, and at some point she may not even notice that she doesn’t actually own one herself.

In other words, don’t look for the horse – look for the experience.

While you’re at it, remind your daughter that dealing with horses would be fun with a Vet Tech degree!  That degree takes a lot of math and science.  Maybe with her love of horses, you can encourage her to really work at math and science.  That will give her a head start in ANY horse related field she goes into later!

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