Sunday 21st December

Today with Smarty I started with playing all seven games with him, all of them went really well. We had one little problem driving the FQ on his right side, but I think this is more down to a friendly game issue so I will work more on friendly game in zone 1 to help this problem.

I then saddled him and played with circles on the 22ft line and today I worked on getting his attention on me by walking backwards like I have been doing with Blossom. This really worked well with him and he did stop and come into me a lot of the time, so this was really nice to see.

We then played with circling over the jump and today he was really good and stayed really calm.

I then mounted and played around with my lateral flexion as I am still teaching him to bend, but it is now getting better. We the followed the rail and played with 9 step back up, he was much softer today than he was yesterday and move back really well.

We then had a little trot and canter and then we were ready to head out on our trail ride with Corine and Sophie. Sophie’s horse had a few problems today so she decided to get off and walk, but wanted to stay in front so she could see if she could handle her horses problems as if she was on her own. So this therefore made the start of the ride a very slow one as her horse seemed to have a lot of thresholds. During this time Smarty was a little star and happily stood and waited until I asked him to go again and didn’t have any problems with anything and stayed relaxed the whole time.

We then got Sophie to let Smarty take the lead otherwise it would have been dark by the time we got round the ride we planned to go on - Smarty was perfect and didn’t put a foot wrong the whole ride I was so proud of him!!

Today I didn’t play with Blossom as I done a ET session on her yesterday, so I washed her tail and gave her a nice groom instead which I think she enjoyed!