Horses

Winston Churchill said:  "There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man."  I think that counts for kids too.

He also so said: "No hour of life is wasted that is spent in the saddle."  Which is good, because we spend a lot of time there!

When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes. ~William Shakespeare, Henry V

"As he was drifting to sleep his thoughts were of horses and of the open country and of horses. Horses still wild on the mesa who'd never seen a man afoot and who knew nothing of him or his life yet in whose souls he would come to reside forever."  ~Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses.

God forbid that I should go to any Heaven in which there are no horses. ~R.B. Cunninghame Graham, letter to Theodore Roosevelt, 1917