Give yourself a break – let StableSecretary keep your equine records organized!
As I mentioned in my introductory blog, I had a baby girl, Emma Rose, on May 25th. To me, the first month of infant care was analogous to caring for four hunters at indoors that all show on the same days and nights. You spend all of your day and night trying to keep up with feeding and watering them, cleaning up their poop, bathing them, brushing them, riding them, taking them to the ring, waiting for jogs, taking care of them after they show, etc. Taking care of a baby or a show horse ends up being a non-stop, cyclical, completely-full-time job that is very exciting and rewarding, but also exhausting. As you become more sleep deprived, the feed-clean-exercise-clean-sleep cycles all start to run together, and you might feel confused about what day it is, when you last fed them, whether you remembered to medicate them, when they had their last bath, how much they’ve pooped or peed that day, etc. Exhaustion seems to take a toll on short-term memory… and it can certainly negatively impact your mood, too!
Back to my experience with the baby – I’m lucky because I’ve had a lot of help. My mom comes to help me for a couple of days during the week to give me some time to work (and shower). My fiancé shares the load in the evenings, nights, and on the weekends. We also use this awesome software program called BabyConnect. It’s a web and mobile app that helps all of the caregivers (me, Emma’s dad, and my mom) track and view the important events in Emma’s life: when was the last diaper change, when did she last eat, how much did she eat, when and for how long has she slept, and medical information like weight, height, and vaccinations. We literally use it all the time, and I truly believe that it helps us take the best care of the baby.
 |
=
|  |
BABY CONNECT |
Using BabyConnect has reinforced for me just how valuable StableSecretary is to barn managers and trainers. When your customers are calling and texting, and you have the farrier and the dentist at the barn on the same day, and then a horse gets injured and the vet has to come also, and you have horses to ride and lessons to teach (which is a pretty typical day for many trainers – yikes!), StableSecretary eases your stress and improves the level of care for your horses because it makes equine record keeping so much simpler. With StableSecretary, you can enter your horses’ health records and service records right away, so you don’t have to wait until the end of the day, week, or month when you might forget the specifics (or the actual event). You can easily find out on your phone when a horse last had its joints injected, or when it last got shoes. You can see all of your horses’ basic entry blank information and all of your horses’ paperwork due dates (coggins, passport, FEI). Because everything is mobile, you can view your feed list, medication schedule, business contacts, horse records wherever you are. StableSecretary also sends you a weekly email message that alerts you to events that are coming up so that you can plan ahead for Barney to get shoes, or to pull a Coggins on Fred, or to schedule the dentist for all of the horses in your barn, for example.
I’m very grateful that a friend recommended BabyConnect to me – it definitely helps me take excellent care of my baby by staying on top of (and ahead of) her needs. For the first week of her life, Emma’s Dad and I wrote down all of her feeding times, diapers, and activities on paper. That system quickly become inefficient, unreliable, and overall a huge pain. In the same sense, StableSecretary replaces day sheets, medications sheets, binders, farrier spreadsheets, vaccination files – it helps improve horse care by making it easy for trainers and barn managers to see when they have medicated, wormed, vaccinated, shod, and injected their horses, and to view other information that is important to the well-being of the horse (and to the trainer’s business). Whether it’s a baby or a horse, these two software programs are great tools in helping you to satisfy the health and comfort needs of those who can’t talk… Be sure to recommend StableSecretary to your horsey friends – they will thank you for it!
