Thursday 11th December

Today was Julie’s last day, so it was quite sad to see her go, even though we have only known each other a couple of weeks we really did become friends! Tonight I will might Corine for the first time and for the rest of my time here I will be working with her.

Today with Blossom I started with back up again, this is now getting much better and a lot softer and now that I know what I am looking for it is making it so much easier! We then moved on to playing with the figure of eight pattern and I was so happy when Blossom done it first time without any of her little strops - I must have done something right yesterday!

We then went back to playing with back up and in between so not to bore her I was getting her to go sideways around me in a circle, she was really good at this today.

We then played with sideways using the point to point game, today I increased the distance she had to go sideways for until she got to rest. She was good and I only had to remind her not to go forwards a couple of times, so this was a big improvement.

Circles were so soft today, always lots of slack in the line even in canter the belly of the rope was still touching the ground. So this was massive as normally she is pulling all the time in canter and makes it very hard for me to just stand relaxed.
Transitions were extremely good today, I couldn’t fault them - she would go up and down the transitions from just phase one.
I still haven’t asked for a full change of direction yet as everything is going so well I don’t won’t to spoil all the hard work we have been putting in as preparation. So today we worked on getting her to come into to me from the circle in trot, it went quite well she would start with coming in in walk and then I would increase my energy and I would get a couple of strides of trot. So I accepted that and didn’t want to push her too much today.

Squeeze over a jump a jump was great - again with this she was really soft, and would stop turn and wait after a few strides after the jump. Normally she wouldn’t disengage until she was at the end of the 22ft line, so this was a real improvement for her today!!

I then jumped on bareback and we started with checking out lateral flexion which was very good and then moved on to our back up and this was really soft!! So we moved on to transitions from walk, trot, stand to back up - the first transition from trot to walk wasn’t great and it took her a few strides to listen to me and slow down, but the rest were really good!
We then played with sideways against the wall and the first couple of tries weren’t great, but they really improved and we managed to go sideways without the wall in both directions - so I was very happy with this.

Well today with Blossom was great, she was like a totally different pony to the one that has been challenging me so much the last few days. She was so soft and willing to try today so it was really good fun to play with her. Maybe she is saying the exact same about me…

Today with Smarty we started with friendly with the CS and then moved on to friendly with the CS and plastic bag. He jumped about a little when I first tried to touch him with it, but very quickly relaxed and allowed me to rub him all over, even on his head!

I decided not to play all seven games in order today as I feel he now has a good understanding off them and as he is so clever I don’t want to start boring him. So we started with playing with sideways as this I would say is still our worse game, today there was improvement and he was more relaxed when moving sideways and when we did stop he really licked and chewed. So I think he is now getting the idea!

We then played with circling game and he was great, his circles are really soft and he disengages really nicely, so we moved on to playing circling over the jump. He was really good and jumped the jump both ways without any problems. Today I was getting him to jump in canter and he is now learning he has to either do a flying lead change or come back to trot after the jumping or he is going to hit the wall or take the corner on the wrong lead. So it has been really interesting watching his progress with this as at the start he couldn’t work out what to do and would nearly hit the wall every time. But today only a stride or two after the jump he would pop in a flying change without any effort, so I was very impressed with how quickly he has picked this up.

I then finished with playing friendly game with the rope around his bum. He was really good with the rope over his saddle area or over his bum and would happily walk round really relaxed but as soon as the rope went around his bum or down by his back legs he would stop and didn’t want to go again. Luckily Eddy came round to see how we were getting on and I asked him what I should do when he stops and he suggested treating it like the driving game and go through my phases to get him to walk on again. So I done this and we managed maybe a lap of he arena in totally with lots of stops on route, but then he stopped and I couldn’t get him to go forward. I went through my phases as Eddy suggested and even using phase 4 I couldn’t get him to walk. I felt I was just standing hitting him, and wasn’t making any difference. So I stopped as I felt I was just going to make the situation much worse and I didn’t want to break what trust Smarty now has in me at this early stage. I will speak to Eddy again about this and see what he thinks the problem is.