The Rocking Horse That is Too nice to use

Miles as a baby

Several years ago (fall of 2004) I had been away from doing wood work for a long time and I had a dream of carving something big and spectacular.  As I began to search for a project I found some info on the internet about carving a rocking horse. It seemed like a good project since I had done sculpturing in high school.  I ordered the packet with the saddle and all the hardware.  January of 2005 I spent about a day gluing up the head and started to carve it out, from there it got placed on the shelf  for about a year and a half.  I believe that it was the winter of 2007 that I finally took the time to glue up the rest of the body and do a bit more carving.   It seemed that I would pull it off the shelf every 5  months and work on it for a few nights swearing that I was going to finish it this time but as usual I would put it back on the shelf to work on some other crazy project.  Finally this year I could see that if i pushed it I could make it for the fair. That is what I did. Becca Thompson my brothers wife was kind enough to spend about a day of her time (She has 4 kids under the age of 7, so that was a lot of time) to paint on the details.  I guess some of the things that helped me finish it are that when the boys came out to my shop they always wanted to ride it, so i would put them up on its back while it was mounted in the chops.  I figured that if I didn't finish it soon they would never be able to enjoy it.

Now that it is done I do ask myself why I decided to build it. If you were to find one online to purchase they go for  $4000 to $7000 dollars.  It is too nice and I spent too much time on it to just let the boys use it unsupervised. The first day I had it in the house Sam got peanut butter (Sams favorite food) all over the base.  I can see my boys in the future painting it, drawing on it, swinging it into the walls, hitting it with the fire place wood poker thing,  and most of all I can see them giving it a hair cut.  The reason I can so easily see these things happening is that I am positive that I would have tried a few of them if I were their age.

So the dilemma is do I leave it at our house so it can be used by them (hope fully with supervision) or do I send it to Malad at one of Anna's grandparents houses where it would be safe from kids but never get used.
I Guess for now it is going to sit in our front room with an electric fence around it set at stun.