Hi! It’s lovely to see y’all here! 😉
You don’t quite know me yet but by the end of this, I promise you will!
My name is Sylviana Faith Vanattia, but I usually just go by Sylvi (or Faith for quick interactions given people can’t get my name right half the time). Currently, I’m 19 years old and finishing out my last year in a duel enrollment program (you can read more about that here https://www.tricountyearlycollege.org/). My future plans are a bit hazy at the moment, besides for the fact that I want a degree in business analysis and want to run HorseSouth, but I’m working that out as I go.Â
So, if you didn’t know HorseSouth was previously published from 2000-2008 by my mother Tess Helmandollar Vanattia. I was born on November 9, 2000 so I kinda came with the very first issue of the magazine, which launched between the 1st and the 9th of November. As I grew up so did the magazine and because of this a lot of my childhood I was home schooled and traveled with my parents and two brothers to an expo called Road to the Horse. Road to the Horse was and still is to this day run by Tootie Bland, and it is a truly good community. (you can read more about it at https://roadtothehorse.com/) My Mum being the main person running HorseSouth ended up knowing about everyone there and in turn everyone knew me.Â
As you can imagine I had a very interesting and exciting childhood traveling around half the time and the other half at home trying to train my own little pony. There’re about a hundred stories I could tell you about what a wild child I was and how even as a kid I was a bit of a entrepreneur. Â
For example: one of my favorite stories that my Mum has told me is when she left me with one of her friends (who shall not be named, you’ll know why in a second.)Â when we were at the GA Horse Fair in Conyers. I was four years old and pretty adventurous, most certainly a handful to say the least and the friend had nodded off (which happens to the best of us) and I was left to my own devices. Now most four year olds left to there own devices may have just played with what they could find or maybe go looking for their parents, right? Well not me! Apparently, I was out for cash that day! I know what your thinking “Oh she must have found a jar of donation money or something!” but no I was raised (even at 4!) to be honest and never steel. So then, how was I going to get any cash?Â
Well… ya’ see, about every women in my family (at least that I know of) can sing and even at that age I was pretty good! So I had the idea to walk down each aisle and visit every stall I could and charge $2 to sing one verse (Yes, only one verse) of twinkle twinkle little star!Â
 Now it did take my parents 30+ minutes to even find out I was missing but once they did it didn’t take them long to find me, given everyone at the horse show knew who I belonged to. Once my Mum found me I had about finished my rounds and upon picking me up my Mum found that I was a little “crunchy”. it turned out that by the end of it I had made about $140. And don’t think my parents didn’t try to give all the money back, but no one would take it back! They said I’d made that money fare and square!Â
Now if that doesn’t tell you what kind of kid I was I don’t know what else will! There are obviously more stories in the next four years that the magazine ran but I’ll save those for another time. After the magazine went out of publishing we started to move around a bit and as with all families we had some issues during the “bubble crisis” or “housing crisis” (I’ve heard different names for it). After things started to settle we ended in not to far from where we started out location wise so it felt like we had really come back home. My brothers and I got in the local school and for about two years I went to a normal middle school but then I found out that there was an amazing school that I was very likely to get into that did Project-based learning with a mastery level grading system and let you take college courses for FREE through all four to five years of your time there. It was a perfect fit and I got in! From there it was only a matter of time before the pieces fell in place and I decided to relaunch HorseSouth. This magazine was the reason I got to learn things and expiration things normal kids would never get to! It’s what helped turn me into the person I am today and I’m more then excited to bring it back!
Besides we are about birthday twins and I can’t just let my birthday twin be left in 2008 now can I?