Friday 5th December

The last week I have been working on getting the ponies to give me happy faces before I feed them in the morning and it night. It has been quite a challenge as both ponies are quite dominant when it comes to feeding time, so it usually takes a good few minutes at each feed for them to put their ears foreword, but tonight as soon as I opened the stable doors their ears were straight foreword it was such a good feeling.

Today with Blossom I didn’t really do very much as she is just came into season and is being a typical mare and today my energy levels were low and I knew if I expected much from Blossom in the mood she was in I was going to have to be a strong leader.
So to start with I worked on porcupine and driving games, to get them really good as I have noticed I have been having to go up my phases recently to get her to yield from pressure and I have also found there is a lot of foreword movement instead of just yielding. So I spent quite a lot of time on this, and it really seemed to pay off as she was yielding really well from just a small phase 1 with lots of licking and chewing!

We then worked on yo yo game to work on her confidence going backwards straight and giving me two eyes, she still has some issues so I give her lots of time to rest and think about it and I feel her confidence is getting much better and I am now able to read her better.. I know feel I know when she is losing her confidence so I can stop and let her rest before she gets really worried and this really seems to be working well for her.
The second yo yo we done, Blossom stopped after a couple of steps backwards and decided to have a roll - she has never done this on line before so it was nice to see and then done a lovely back up all the way to the end of the 22ft line.

We then played with squeeze game over a jump - this went really well today so we only done a couple of jumps and left it at that for the day.

Today with Smarty we played friendly game with a plastic bag on the end of the CS. Smarty thought this was the scariest thing ever!! So it took over and hour of approach and retreat to get him confident enough to let me touch him with it. But once he realised it wasn’t going to kill him and it was ok to let it touch him, I was able to rub him all over with it so we finished with that for the day.