We waited a long time for this foal (baby horse)! Although most horses carry a foal for 340 day, Anna’s mare, Elbe, carried this baby for 374 days! She was a month overdue. At one point, weeks after the baby was due, Anna was convinced Elbe wasn’t even pregnant; only fat. She wasn’t showing any signs of being pregnant except for the “hay belly”. As it turns out, Elbe was “cooking her just long enough to be perfect.”

As Trakehner foals must be named with the first letter of the mother’s name, her name had to start with an “E”. With the help of her Trainer, Jeannette, we decided on “Expressive”, we call her Penny for short.

She is an absolutely adorable baby Trakehner. She is not as large as our last baby, Linux, who is a colt (male).

Here are some pictures of her.

To the right, you can see our latest addition to our Ranch, Linux, Trakehner colt (boy). You can also see Anna, Ashton and Mocha.

Florida

This year started with a trip to Florida so we could see family and spend time in the Florida sun. We stayed with David and Marcy for few months. Ashton found some beach volleyball players and amazingly got a sunburn in the middle of winter.

We also got to spend time with Ashton’s relatives: Grandpa Joe, Aunt Debbie, Uncle Lenny, and cousins Jared and Evan.

Montana

In June, Anna’s Pregnant Mare gave birth to Linux, an adorable, kind colt (pictured above).

Ashton learned how to weave apple pie crusts (and make apple pies).

We had another handful of friends visit us this summer. Grandpa Joe and Geoffrey visited for over a week. It’s always so much fun having Grandpa Joe around.

Just before our family came to visit, one of my best friends from school agreed to come and live with us for a year. Ashton has been teaching him websites, and he’s been helping Anna with the horses and running the ranch.

While Geoffrey and Ross were here, we managed to have a successful one-day LAN (computer game) party!

November

In November, Anna went to the Florida to visit her friends at Valhalla Farms and attend the American Trakehner Association’s Annual Convention. Ashton went to Front Sight for a four-day defensive handgun course, and then to Los Angeles for Delphi LA’s Alumni Weekend.

Websites in a Flash

Our website business, Websites in a Flash, has continued to expand. We’ve been very fortunate to find some very good help and have been keeping them busy with lots of work. We’ve had a lot of fun working on projects together. We even had a “Formal Friday” where we all went out to lunch dressed to the nines. We have a lot of fun.

Trakehners and Dressage

Anna has continued to show her horses in Dressage competitions in the North West. She had three successful shows with several first and second placings. She earned second place in her division for Trakehners across the nation!

You can see her horses at http://www.tptrakehners.com/

<3,
Ashton and Anna Sanders

Since I couldn’t leave this as such a boring post, I decided to continue by posting pictures of some of the randomity of 2010: namely anything that wasn’t important enough to have it’s own blog post. Enjoy.

On October 8th, we had “Formal Friday”. We even went out to lunch at the Hot Spot. =)

AshAnna watched Julie and Julia together and Anna got super excited to cook some yummy foods. This was our breakfast the next morning! Yummy!

Oh, and I (Ashton) cooked my first apple pie. I still have lots to learn, but it was edible…

My friend from Von Rocko gave me an awesome storm trooper picture for a present, and I fell in love with StarCraft 2. (I got to play the beta for a few glorious months.) Here’s my work station:

Anna competed in 3 Dressage competitions this year, and qualified to compete a the championships!

What would a blog post be without a picture of Mocha being adorable:

Enjoy,
Ashton

To the right, you can see Liana (pregnant Trakehner mare), Anna, Ashton and Maple Pancake in front of our house.

Our ranch is still keeping us very occupied. We planted another 15 baby trees just in case we run out of oxygen. We added 500 feet of underground water pipes to add 4 hydrants all around our property.

The largest project we have done to date was building a new “Epic Barn!” With the help of many great neighbors and friends, we took down and rebuilt this 1000+ sq ft barn! (You can see endless details on our AshtonAnna Blog. )

Anna’s Top Priority Trakehners is doing great. Liana (above) is pregnant (due 2010). They also purchased a new Trakehner named Elbe: an imported mare from Germany. She had a small meeting with Trakhener Breeders from Idaho and Montana, plus a special guest, Dr. Maren Engelhardt, a breeder from Germany.

Anna went for a 3 week apprenticeship with a Trakhner breeding farm in Florida and started showing the first horse she bred: Ossette.

On the nerd front, Ashton found a great group of web programmers in Montana. He has done a few presentations on topics like CSS and Search Engine Optimization. He’s learned a lot and found some more great friends.

Ashton’s Websites in a Flash business is still doing great, starting out the year with a brand new website re-design and another consistent highest-ever income year. The more he learns, the more he realizes that the learning curve for web developers never really ends.

Here’s a collection of my favorite posts from 2009:

Sledding on our neighbor’s hill

ATV 306′s on Ice

First 2009 Spring Grub Club

Epic Barn Project Begins

Digging a Moat around our house

Epic Barn Completed

<3,
Ashton and Anna

In case you didn’t know, our family is here in Polson, Montana at the Ashton and Anna Headquarters, but this time the activities were epic! Ranging from barn raising to water skiing, the family has lined up for a week of fun and games in true Montana style, basically.

I created a AshtonAnna header design for this blog, which you can see here:

Here are some photos of some of the activities on the Lake:

Here’s me and Ashton flying around in the tube (also a new header):

This is AshtonAnna’s “I’m on a Boat” picture:

This was fantastically hard to do.

Me pulling my parents around:

Here’s a quick family photo:

I’m leaving first thing in the morning, and the rest of the family will be leaving later this week.

Great Trip!
Geoffrey

We finally had fairly decent weather for our grub club, so we decided to build a campfire. For the first grub club campfire of last year we burned a dog house, so we had to come up with something fun and cool that we could do/burn…

Are those Pizza Hut boxes?

That’s right. We made a Pizza Hut Fort! Donald came up with the structure idea: using card stacking methods to build the different layers.

Our completed Epic Pizza Hut Bonfire:
(Epic Pizza Hut Bonfire creators: John, Jeb, Corey, Eric, Ashton, Donald.)

We each got a torch…

And lit it up!

Then we celebrated with some jump shots.

Picture documentation provided by Anna.

Good Times,
Ashton Anna

(How did we get so many pizza boxes, you ask? We are freinds with 50%+ of the pizza hut staff, and I love pizza (and pasta), so they hook me up with leftovers. Anna decided to save all the boxes through the winter for an epic campfire! So epic.)

I finally was getting used to all the snow. I was hoping to get 3-6 feet drifts, like we got last January… and it starts to thaw… Normally it doesn’t thaw until March or April, but our south-facing hill has been without snow for weeks already.

I saw the sun setting and decided to take a ride up our hill to see what kind of pictures I could get.

In this first one you can see the Mission Mountains and a series of sledding paths that we created in December and January.

Here’s a shot of our house and Bo, the extremely “skiddish” Wild Mustang.

Here’s Jett (Carol’s other wild mustang) in his new head shot with a nice backdrop.

Here’s a poster-style shot of Bo.

Here’s a picture of Aspen, and in the background you can see her baby, Maple, and Onora (Nora).

Well that’s it for interesting photos from Ashton Anna’s Ranch. Now for the Website Updates

Website Updates:

On Friday, Donald and I started working on a side project called “Polson.MontanaFinder.com”. We’re hoping to create a useful directory for everything there is to know about Polson, Montana. There is nothing on the website yet, except a couple pages of broken code. I have put up a temporary design for MontanaFinder.com. I should have a website up by next weekend. *knocks on wood*

Also, I had a breakthrough in designing my new website for WebsitesinaFlash.com. I’ve been trying to redesign my website for at least a year, and I just couldn’t think of anything I liked. Today I started putting together a simple design for the Montana Finder website and liked it so much, I adopted it. I hope to unveil it very soon.

That’s all from Montana
Ashton Anna

Enjoy!

One of the things we did was go to the local Museum:







AshAnna seeing who’s Bicep is bigger.

The Boys on a Teeter-Totter

This week we had the largest attended grubclub yet! We had over 25 people there!

We also hit the Flathead lake:

We visited Lee Kessler in Eureka:

And then went to a RODEO!!!

Look at all those shoes collected by the Lost and Found!

Just Kidding:

My parents should be sending me their pictures, and then I’ll have another update!

Here’s some pictures of our house:


(I brought these green urchin shells home from CCV)

Here are some of our Animals:

Our House:

Time for Breakfast:

Time to head out…

To the Lake:

We took a break and visited the Stanfield’s for a boat and some more photos:

Then Back to the lake:

For some water skiing:

We met up with the Grub-Clubbers at Pizza Hut…

And went off to do some Sparklers and Fireworks!

Happy Fourth,
AshAnna

And no one else wanted to get in the water, so I went for a quick run in the tube (emphasis on quick). I think I was on the tube for a minute before I finally got dropped out of the wake, and instantly flipped. =)

It’s been very hot up here, so I’m sure it’ll be nice and warm very soon.

-”I hate cold water”
-Ashton