I did not grow up in a horse family, so though I have horse girl mom role models (Hoppy Stearns, Winter Paxson, Cindy Buchanan, Bridgett Woody and Maddie Henry are a few), I can’t frame best practices for horse girl parenting around personal childhood experience. I would be boldly remiss in not mentioning that my mom and dad did subsidize the purchase of my first horse, however. He was a quirky but flashy bay Arabian named Backstreet Rajah, “Raffi,” an anomaly, and therefore bargain, bought at a Quarter Horse auction in Timonium, Maryland, with Mindy Chernoff and Tracy Orne in the late 1900s, and the $700 I saved working all summer at the age of 12 didn’t quite cover his purchase price. (Tracy also pitched in $40 late that August, and we are still friends to this day.)

Despite driving me to the barn three or four days a week for over a decade, I believe the first horse show my mom ever attended was this past Saturday, when her daughter was, yes, 39, and her granddaughter was 9. In her words: “I don’t like them because I’m allergic to horses, as well as dogs that aren’t mine, and everyone except one person makes a stupid mistake and loses.” For reference, Part 1: She has a German shepherd mix and a rough-coated collie, two of the most voracious shedders I’ve ever known; and Part 2: She hates the Olympics for this reason too (sorry, Boyd).

If you haven’t read my first blog, about tackling Devon with my two daughters—Daley, 9, and Birdie, 6—you can catch up here. Things had been going pretty well. We kicked off with the Dog Show at the Horse Show on Thursday night, hosted by What A Good Dog. Our Devon-themed costume team, with our dogs dressed as Shetland ponies and the girls dressed as Shetland pony jockeys, came in second place. Friday night we had a “good” final practice—meaning that Harvey refused to jump anything in the beginning, and 27 minutes later (hard stop for the kid’s bedtime) he was jumping the best I’ve ever ridden him. Both girls were asleep by 7:45, which was great because I knew Daley would be up late the next night, and Bird had a big day with leadline.  

So, when Daley woke up with a fever of 102 degrees on the morning she had spent 364 days waiting for, I was at a bit of a loss. In the 17 minutes before leaving our house on Saturday morning (I was on a deadline because I had the full breakfast spread for all the kids and numbers for five leadline ponies), I grappled with the fine line of enabling your kid to have grit, and enabling yourself to be a completely “delulu” (delusional) parent, throwing her sick child on a pony she barely knows, in a class she fell off in the year before.  

My freshman year of college, after losing a gold earring, my roommate’s mother, Carol Hess, consoled me by saying, “It’s not a problem if it can be fixed by time or money—(pause for dramatic effect) and you have it,” and later presented me with an identical pair of earrings. In Carol Hess style, I ran the clock, leaving Daley at home with my husband Dray and slotting Birdie into the early Devon shift with me.

Birdie, outside of the shadow of her older sister, the same Birdie who asked to “take a break from riding” until after the summer last year, and cried for 75% of the Cheshire Children’s Hunt earlier this year, transformed into a horse crazy 6-year-old.  She and I cuddled in a camping chair at our pre-show breakfast, colored pages together, and she kept excitedly asking, “Is it time to tack up yet?”

From the Springhouse Farm team, we had two ponies fully outfitted in side-saddle gear, with Kate Kocher’s daughter Cora and Birdie riding aside in the older kids’ class. Birdie was ecstatic to see my extended family, her kindergarten teacher, and her favorite babysitter cheering her on. In what I later referred to as the Kocher family takeover, in a field of over 60, Cora came in second, Kate’s younger son Jesse came in sixth and Birdie was announced as reserve rider in seventh.  

Leaving the ring was bittersweet for me, as my youngest has now aged out of it, but that’s where you come in with your sweet 3- or 4-year-old daughter, dear reader, who also comes from a non-horsey family. The leadline gods, and the side-saddle community at large, have been kind to me, and I’d love to share tack and the ounce of wisdom I’ve gleaned with another game young mom.

With one event down and two to go, we untacked ponies and took the kids for festivities at the carnival. From a call with my husband, I learned that Motrin (not a sponsor of this blog!) had kicked in for Daley, her temp had returned to 98.6, and she was weepy at the prospect of missing her class at Devon. I called her, and we decided that if she ate a family-sized chicken noodle soup from Wawa, slept for two hours, and read a book in bed until 7 p.m. we could reconnect and maybe have her pop over by 8 p.m. 

In a nod to history, and as probably has been done countless times on this exact property, but not likely in the past 100 years, Kate Kocher’s 12-year-old son, Bruce Betchel III, gamely offered to warm up Daley’s mount, Tootsie Pop, in a side-saddle in the Wheeler Ring. 

My husband picked up Birdie to take her home to a babysitter for the evening, and so on family day at Devon, I found myself adrift, without a family. So I did what any reasonable mom would do. I ordered a Devon Special and a large lemonade and enjoyed my first uninterrupted meal of 2025. Re-energized and rejuvenated, I met up with the rest of Team Wingin’ It, as well as the whole crew from River Hills Foxhounds (Pennsylvania). We tacked up and headed over to warm up, and Dray called to say that Daley had slept, eaten and drank, and that she was excited to ride. I cautiously agreed to having her come over.  

Have you ever picked up your sick kid from school and felt guilty in the administration office because your child literally looks like they are about to start the next pandemic? That is the visual I’d like you to have in your mind as you envision Daley, with a puffer coat over her habit, nestled on my husband’s beer cooler, shivering as she watched me warm up for hunt teams. She was so sick that, as her own mother, I decided not to share my red lipstick with her. As I’ve mentioned in my earlier blogs, I sometimes think I’m more traumatized by Daley’s fall last year than she is; little kids are resilient and have much shorter memories than us adults do. After stopping almost every lap around the warm-up ring to check on her, Dray finally advised me to take my fences one at a time and focus on hunt teams.

Focus on hunt teams we certainly did. For those new to the event, a course of fences is taken by three consecutive riders at a fair hunting distance and pace, with the final jump being taken in perfectly timed tandem by all three riders abreast. Sarah Kirk, Amanda Howe and I are geographically separated by hundreds of miles, and the warm-up ring was packed, so our first and only attempt at the final fence was in the Dixon Oval. Team Wingin’ It nailed it, and we were thrilled with our fourth place ribbon.  

The fuzzy endorphins from a nice round dissipated as I came out of the ring as Daley was getting on to warm up, only to realize that due to lack of entries the parent/child over fences class had been canceled. Most of the other entries for the family class were already in the ring, and our class had potentially already started. Daley and I locked eyes, I asked her if she wanted to do it, even though she hadn’t had a chance to warm up, and she said yes. Seeing Tootsie Pop, a beautiful pony in his own right made even moreso by gleaming side-saddle tack and a beautiful braid job, brought color, as well as a long overdue smile, back to her face.

Obviously it’s never great to rush at a trot up to the in-gate late for your class, but there are much worse things happening in the news globally (people are dying!), nationally and locally, so don’t worry about it guys. We ended up in the ring, and as I look back on the class, I can really only remember two things.  

1. Thanks to the Chronicle community, combined with the astute collective memory that only the hardcore perennial late night fans observing the family class at Devon can have, as we circled the ring at a walk, we were greeted with applause and cheers from every corner, encouraging Daley on and sending well wishes. My heart could have burst.  

2. I did not take my eyes off of Daley, and I did not stop talking to her the entire class, and I have the photos and (permanent?) neck misalignment to prove it.  

We nailed our first canter transition, and rather than cheerleading I said to her, “The second you feel tired, let me know, and we can pull up to a walk.” In a vision from her future teenage self, blue lipped, pale, drunk on Motrin and the high of being thrust into competing, she gave me a dramatic eye roll and kicked on her pony as he started to slow down in a corner. We reversed, walked and trotted the other direction. But reader, we’ve been here before, and we literally tripped at the finish line last year.

Of course, we were smack on the straightaway of the never-ending Dixon Oval when the judge instructs all riders to canter, and after a count of 1, 2, 3, we were off. Harvey was on autopilot, as he had been this entire class and admittedly most of our relationship, and he set himself up into a beautiful frame in a classic, collected canter. Daley and Tootsie Pop picked up the wrong lead. I was hit with the question: Do I tell her, and have her bring him down and swap, potentially throwing her off balance and off her horse, or do I say nothing, smile in line-up, tell her she did a great job, and head home? What would you do? I prayed he would auto swap when we hit the end of the ring, but unfortunately I think I had already prayed for too many things that day, and it didn’t happen. Since you’re cantering ad infinitum, I literally had time to verbally play out both scenarios to Daley as we were riding, and she decided to take him down to a trot, and he picked up the correct lead.  

The class ended. I literally wept (no other word for the upwelling of emotion I feel) and couldn’t stop touching Daley’s shoulder. We came in third. Daley took a victory gallop. We walked out of the ring with eight hooves underneath us, instead of just two feet. My parents were there for a picture. My husband pulled Harvey’s braids for me and brought me a celebratory Miller Lite in bed when we got home, even though he is a dentist, and I had already brushed my teeth. I was asleep before the second sip.  

They say it takes a village, and as I’ve gone through another season at Devon with a mosaic of friends and family supporting me and my girls, the myriad intertwined ways this community has been there for us is not lost on me. The feathers in my fascinator for leadline were a Kentucky Derby hostess party gift from my hunt teams teammate, Sarah Kirk, compliments of her flock of emus, chickens and peafowl. Holly Bernhard’s side-saddle, bought for her by her own mother when she was a child at the Devon Horse Show in the 1970s, made its return to the Dixon Oval in multiple classes this year. The Jump Coop Farm ladies, who won hunt teams aside, got Daley situated for the family class in a hairnet, bun and stock tie while I was warming up to compete against them. 

My Devon journey is not done, but admittedly, as I write this, three of four Smiths now have 102 degree fevers, and I am one of them. Has the limit pusher hit her limit? You’ll just have to see in the U.S. Equestrian Federation side-saddle division on Ladies’ Day. Wednesday at 12 p.m.—80% chance of torrential rain, 100% chance I’ll be there in a navy habit on a big white horse. (Daley read this and said, “Mom, there’s no such thing as a white horse; he’s gray.”)

Read Sally’s other Devon blogs here.

Sally Smith is the senior director of sales at Joule, a life science consultancy where she leads strategic growth initiatives within the biotech and pharma sector. She lives with her husband, two daughters and two poodles in a dilapidated but charming 1800s restored barn in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. A lifelong equestrian and karaoke enthusiast, Sally foxhunts with the River Hills Foxhounds and is an active member of the sporting and side-saddle community.