Monday 29th December

Today I started with Blossom, today her feet seem fine but I decided to play safe and try and just play with her at walk so not to put any extra pressure on her feet just incase there is a more serious problem.

So today we started with lots of friendly and the move on to playing with sideways over a pole, she is now really good with me in her left eye. But with me on her right she finds this more difficult and tends to still go forwards and backwards a lot, instead of just sideways. So I spent a lot of time working on her confidence with me in zone 3 while she was standing over the pole.

We then played with backwards, which was very good today none of her usual strops and trying to run off!! So we then played with backwards into the trailer and today she was very good and went in very quickly without any problems and stood there really calm and relaxed while I spoke to Marieke.

I then played with change of direction, but today only at walk and I think this really helped me and Blossom really get the hang of the pattern, instead of doing it a few times in walk and then rushing to do it in trot.

I then went into the roundpen to play at liberty. I started with some stick to me to really get her connected to me and then played with the seven games. The first 4 games were really good and I really couldn’t fault them, circling was also good but she didn’t always go in the direction I asked her to go on and sometimes would change direction by herself while one the circle. But her disengage was good and her draw to me was really good and this is normally our problem with this game at liberty. Squeeze game just didn’t work… I would ask her to squeeze between me and the fence (big space) But instead of disengaging she would canter off, and then stop half way round the corral and then come back to me! So I decided to give sideways a try and this didn’t work very well either, she did go sideways a little to start with but wasn’t connected to me and was more running away. So I put her back on line and started with the squeeze game and she was perfect!! Yes she was online but the belly of the rope was on the ground and I was disengaging her with only using the CS, so I thought well I will try with the halter round her neck. Again perfect, so I went back to liberty and the exact same thing happened… I am pretty sure I done everything the same so I am not sure what the problem is. Eddy is in America just now, so I can’t ask him but I will maybe try and get Marieke to watch me tomorrow and see if she can see what the problem is..

Today with Smarty my plans got interrupted as a couple of the geldings were turned out into the arena to let them have a play as they all have lots of energy just now - but these two went mad a really galloped about bucking and rearing etc. So I had just saddled Smarty so started of in the round pen warming him up to ride and then mounted, but he really didn’t like it in the round pen and was getting quite bored. So I headed out to the arena and just rode around the other horses, which was sometimes a challenge! So today we really didn’t do very much and finished quite early as it wasn’t easy to ride round horses playing and galloping about.