My birthday this year...

I awoke to a nice sunny day, 6am and looked out the window....Abi was laying down, why wasn't the foaling alarm not beeping? (it had gone off constantly all night and nothing was happening so Rick had asked Rachel to turn it off....)
I thought this may be it, but I will wait a little longer before waking Rachel, and sure enough I thought it was a false alarm as she got up and didn't seem to do anything again for a while...8am arrived and Rachel's banging on my bedroom door ...."get dressed Abi's having her foal" she was buzzing and running on adrenaline...so I said calm down, get the foaling kit and we will watch from the deck.
we watched and waited, we eventually decided we needed a closer view, so I elected to quietly walk around the road for a closer view, and to signal if I thought the vet needed to be called.

Abi gave me a scare, as she spotted me & got up with the foals head & leg sticking out!
she laid down giving Rachel a better view so I quietly went back to her and we waited anxiously.

At roughly 9.20am the foal arrived and then we stood waiting for it to get out the sack...thats when we had to go and help (I slowly went over and had to take it off the foals head so it could breathe) and then we left them alone.

The foal was up on its feet in 20 minutes,
I have pictures on my phone, that I took earlier, but the ones below are a few of the ones that I took with my new camera when I got home after lunch at Ziff's.

I found out then it was a Filly, and because it was my birthday I got to name her, the Sire is a Dutch Warm Blood called Voltaire II and tradition says that the progeny name should begin with the same letter so her name is Vivacia, Acia for short. I got this name from a book trilogy I read 'The Liveship trilogy' Robin Hobb is the author and I have loved her books.

so every one say Ahh...... and Hi to Vivacia, She was about 7 hours old when I took these pictures.

The vet came to check mum & bubs out at 6pm and then we quickly went to the Cabbage tree for a meal.... here's a really nice shot of Jason & Cole. The food was superb, huge plates... I couldn't eat all mine, neither could anyone else! and The deserts... well they were huge too...I intended to eat it all, but they cleared my plate while I was powdering my nose (I'm sure my waistline is grateful) and I will be back for another sample soon!
I'll post some more pictures of Acia soon as I get them off my phone (Rachel took some proper SLR photos - with Telephoto zoom so hopefully they will be ace!)