My name is Michael, some people like my grams call me Mike. I like that, but my mom and my sister can’t really get used to it so they mostly still call me Michael. I’ll be ten years old in August. Right now, I’m still nine and I’m in the 4th grade.

My mom is Riyan Rivero and she works for David Boggs at Midwest. We live in Arizona where I go to the same school as Emma Boggs. Emma is a year ahead of me in school but she’s my good friend. I’ll miss her a lot in the summer when she goes home to Minnesota.

Emma and I are both going to be in a school musical about Tom Sawyer. I was kind of afraid I wouldn’t remember my lines if I was an actor, so I’m going to be in the choir. Emma is braver and she’s going to be in the acting part of things. I think Emma will be a celebrity when she grows up, maybe a singer or a movie star.

I like the horses a lot and I hope that someday I’ll have a horse of my own. I want to name a baby filly PS I Love You. That’s from a movie I saw and I think it would be a really good horse name.

I love the parties at Midwest. One of my favorite things is getting my face painted. But I also really like having lots of nice people around looking at all the beautiful horses and being happy together. That’s fun and a good thing.

I have a big sister named Kylie who goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara. I think she’ll be a famous book writer someday like our grams. Our grams used to be called Jo West Lauter, but for her books she is J. L. Hardesty. Hardesty is the name of her dad, our great grampa. Grams says she’s not famous. But she is to us.

I have a brother named Cole who is fourteen. He got a guitar for Christmas. He really likes the horses and he likes to work in the barn with Ricardo (our mom’s husband). Cole might get famous too, maybe as a guitar player or a horse trainer.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up and I don’t even know if I want to be famous. I just know I want to do something good that makes people happy. I guess I have plenty of time to figure out what that’s going to be.

I’d like to have some pen pals. So I hope that some of you who read this will write to me at Midwest. We would all like to hear your horse stories.

Sincerely,
Michael (Mike) Brady