Sunday 28th December

Today Blossom’s feet appeared to be better, she certainly wasn’t as sore as she was yesterday so this was really good.

Marieke spoke to their barefoot trimmer and she is going to come and see Blossom on the 5th and have a look for me and suggest what I should do with her feet and what all the possibilities are…

Today I started with Smarty and decided seen as the riding is now going so well I should work more online and start with some of the level two tasks to keep us both progressing.
So today we started with friendly game and the yo yo game, this was really good today. We then spent a lot of time playing with sideways as he still isn’t confident with this game - he can move sideways really and both front and back legs cross really well, but he is still always trying to go forward. Just now we are still playing against the fence, but even then his head is as close to the fence as possible and he is even trying to get his head over the fence like he is really trying to escape. So today I took it really slowly and I asked him to keep going sideways until he did relax, this seemed to help and he done lots of licking and chewing!!

We then played with yo yo game over a pole, he was really good at this - a little unsure to start with but very quickly worked out what I was asking of him and he was going backwards and over the pole without any problems.

We then played with circles and started playing with transitions today by wiggling the rope, but this didn’t go very well so we will need to work more on this to teach him what I am asking and also make sure he is confident.

We then started playing with change of direction - only at walk and he was really good and appeared quite confident doing this and would even draw to me at trot!!

Next we played with the figure of eight pattern, we had a few problems to start with - but by the end he appeared more relaxed and was nearly able to do the pattern in trot without problems. So I will continue to work on this so he learns the pattern.


Today with Blossom I didn’t want to do very much with her because of her feet but thought it would be good for her to walk about a little if nothing else.
So we started with a little stick to me just playing with walk, stop and backup and she was really good and her feet didn’t appear to be hurting her. So we played with sideways and then sideways over a pole, she is now more confident going sideways over the pole with me in zone 3 so this is good.

We then played with backwards over a pole and today we only had to retreat once, so this is an improvement for her!!

I then mounted bareback and we just walked round a few times and finished for the day.