A pony pathway for our community.
Tiny Tales Pony Rescue Society, a registered charity here in Canada, has been building something new, together with All4Nolan. It's called Paradise Paddock, a space built first to enrich the lives of our rescued ponies, giving them a calm, purposeful role that suits who they are. It was our life with Nolan, and everything we've shared through All4Nolan, that inspired us to open that space to the autism community too. So alongside the ponies, it will welcome homeschoolers, neurodivergent kids, kids who need room to move, a slower pace, and ponies who don't ask them to mask anything.
Here's the update nobody asked for but everybody deserves: we've actually been building. Not just talking about it, not just dreaming about it in a Notes app at 11pm. The pathways are in. The gazebo is up. We cleared the land and prepped the rest of the site for spring renovations. It's real now. You could walk it.
What doesn't show up in the pathways or the gazebo is this. Nolan homeschools, so he's with me every day. He runs down to check the build with me, asks questions, peeks in on progress like it's his too, because it is. What I didn't expect was everything underneath it. Hours of emails and questions to insurance just to figure out how to run this safely. Learning processes I never had to learn before. Grant writing. So much more than I ever thought I signed up for. This started as gravel on a path out to a picnic table. It grew and grew. Some days it distracts me from almost everything else, and I'll be honest, I panic a little every time I hit a wall or a speed bump I didn't see coming.
And I won't sugarcoat this either: we're out of money to keep going.
Building anything from scratch is expensive, and building something accessible and safe for our ponies and the families who spend time with them is a different kind of expensive. We got this far on what we had. The next phase, the gardens, the water features, finishing off the areas we prepped, all needs funding we don't currently have.
This space exists for our ponies first. It gives them a calm, purposeful role, time with people, gentle work suited to who they are. What grows out of that is something real for our families too, a place where your kid or a kid you love could come feel calm around a pony instead of overwhelmed in a setting not designed for them
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So this is me asking. If Paradise Paddock is the kind of thing you want to exist in the world, I'd love your help getting us there. Whether that's a donation to Tiny Tales Pony Rescue Society, sharing this post, or just telling one other parent about us, all of it moves the needle.
We didn't build the pathways for nothing. We just need help finishing the walk.
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