Sweet Girl

A nursery of foals running around in the pasture, wobbly on their new legs.
This is how I first met Dulce Nina, who we just call Nina for short. I met her as a foal one weekend, she had been born during the middle of that week. Not really standing out from the lot, my brother and I just enjoyed watching them play because they were so adorable.
We never took particular notice to Nina until she was kept in the stall over the winter because she had an eye infection. More like 'Shy Girl' instead of 'Sweet Girl', she stood facing the corner, refusing to look at us, no matter how hard we tried to lure her out. Once she was released from the infirmary, she was let back outside to grow.

We never really planned on getting another horse. It just came spontaneously. When we heard that Lorraine wanted to sell the barn and auction off all of the horses, we asked Andre which one of the babies was the best. At the time, it was down to three babies: Obrero, Futuro, and Dulce Nina. He said that out of them, Nina had the most potential other than his own baby, Elegante, that he recently bought from Lorraine at the auction at Nationals that fall.
Auction day was a blur. We walked in to find a crowd of people seated on hay bales in the arena; all the horses were lined up and wearing numbers on their flanks. My brother and I approached Nina in her stall and my brother promised her that he would buy her. A whirlwind of bids later, we were the proud owners of Dulce Nina. My brother and I rejoiced and took about a million pictures of our new family member. Nina was just over a year old.
So now we have this baby horse. What do we do with her? The first step we made was desensitizing her. We worked on our bond with her, my brother connecting with her the most. Andre suggested that we do Bella Forma with her. Bella Forma is a class in shows where you have either one or two people and you walk the filly or colt around the arena to show her or his gait. It's kind of like a dog show, only with a horse. The first year we competed with her, my mom was by herself with Nina because Nina was still little. As Nina grew, she went on double lines and my brother joined in. We won a few classes, I believe we qualified for Nationals, but we decided not to go.
This past year was Nina's first year competing under saddle. We did well, but not as well as we would have liked to. Andre told us that she had a lot of potential and was even turning out better than Elegante. He told us that we had a pretty good Fino horse on our hands and we were thrilled. What luck we had to have a Fino horse bought at an auction! But something went wrong, and Nina became angry and unwilling to work. We thought, maybe Andre was over working her? But none the less, she flat out stopped in the middle of the sound board when we were competing in Kentucky this past year. She became angry and wanted nothing to do with us anymore. Shortly after that, we stopped training, and after that, Andre was fired from our current stable.
Now Nina is getting down to work. After having quite a few months off to play, bond even more with Brie, and not do really anything, she is very eager to learn under Ray. Ray tells us that at the least, we will have a very high quality performance horse, but that he doesn't want to make any promises about whether she is Fino or not. We're all very eager to see how she turns out, but she has now grown into her name none the less. She is certainly a sweet girl.