Thursday 18th December

Today I wasn’t feeling well before lunch So I did consider just going home in the afternoon and not playing with Blossom, but I am so glad I decided to stay and play with her as we had a really good day!!

We started again today with working on Blossom’s confidence in zone 5 and played with backing into objects, we played with the pole, jumps, blocks, wall, the trailer, and the trailer ramp. She was very good and manages to get very close to all the objects now, still needs more work on loading into the trailer backwards. But I was so impressed with how well she done this!!






I the played with trailer loading from a distance, not sure what the distance actually was but I do know it was more than 22ft as I had to run as she got closer to allow her enough rope to go in. She was brilliant and was even cantering the last few strides!! Eddy then asked if I could load her at liberty?? Well I didn’t know as I had never tried… So I took the halter off and played a little friendly then sent her to the trailer from about 20ft away and she trotted off and straight into the trailer - I was totally amazed and I think Eddy was a little too!!

So I then decided to play with liberty a little and played in walk, trot and back up some stick to me and she was really good and stayed with me and didn’t even think about leaving. I then decided to challenge ourselves even more and asked her to stand on the pedestal and she done it, first time!!

Sorry the photo isn’t great, but just couldn’t resist putting it up!!



I then put the bareback pad on her for the first time, I think I bought it in May oops! But I couldn’t get myself in a good position today as the leather straps are so bulky as I have to wrap them round the cinch so many times so I didn’t feel as if I was on my balance point all the time as my legs couldn’t really hang as I wanted them because of the straps. So I think this affected how Blossom went as she had loads of go - but I think this was a little because I was leaning more forward than I have been bareback.. Maybe not though..
So I tried to just walk as asking for anything faster resulted in us galloping around the arena, so the main focus of todays session was to get her bending really softly to a stop and also work on our backwards and a little work on sideways. This all went well once she calmed down and started listening to me again, so we finished on that.

Today with Smarty I couldn’t really play with him after his Equine Touch session yesterday, but I wanted to do a little something with him to stretch his legs. So we just went into the arena and I gave him a groom and then we played with stick to me. I haven’t really done this with him yet, so he was a little worried and confused to start with as I was having to correct him a lot to try and get him to stay with me. But after alap of the arena with lots of rest spots and friendly he got the idea of this new game and we even managed a little trot.
We finished our little session with him standing on the pedestal.