Thursday 4th December

Last nights dinner was a success!!! Thanks to Elle’s macaroni with bacon and leek recipe she had left here - thank you!!

Today started of really cold, wet, windy and we even had some snow !! So this afternoon when I went out to play with Blossom I really wasn’t in the mood to do very much as I was so cold! We started our play session with lots of friendly and played with the S pattern as I walked backwards to encourage her to give me two eyes, think she is starting to get the idea of this..

We the played with yo yo game over a pole, today I spent a lot of time making sure the back up was straight and that Blossom gave me two eyes. So this took quite a lot of time as we had to do lots of approach and retreat and also lots of rest periods. But by the end we got a lovely straight back up over a pole, much better than I have ever had before!

I had the arena to myself so I decided to have go at the seven games at liberty in the round pen, the first 3 games went really well and I was happy with these. But yo yo game wasn’t so good, as soon as I asked Blossom to go back she left… But she did come back to me straight away, so I suppose that was a good thing. I then decided to forget yo yo and give circling game a go as she seemed to want move her feet so I thought it might be worth a try.. Circling was then best we have ever managed at liberty I was very surprised at this. The send wasn’t brilliant, but she went out on the circle and stayed calm and disengaged and came back to me when I asked, which was lovely as normally she goes out and just runs wild on the circle and totally ignores me. We then played with yo yo game again and it worked really well, so not sure what the problem first time round was..

As I still had the arena to myself I dicided to make the most of it and done a little bareback riding, this way if I fell off no one would see!!
Blossom was very good and was relaxed most of the time, so maybe yesterdays passenger lesson as helped her more than I originally thought it would. Also riding bareback gave me the chance to really work on staying on my balance point, as I do have a tendency to lean forward when I am riding and I don’t think this really helps Blossom with her impulsion.

With Smarty today I played again with the seven games and to make sure I do lots of friendly in between every game we play a different type of friendly to get him more calm and relaxed with new things. Today we added in friendly with me standing in zone 3 and 4, friendly on the move as I walked backwards, friendly all over with the rope, friendly in zone 1 swinging the rope over his head as if my rope was a skipping rope, and also tossing the rope over his head from zone 3 in preparation for one rein riding. He was really good with all this new stuff and I am going to carry on playing with all of these and hopefully think up some new friendly games to play with him - any suggestions welcome!!
We finished our session with playing with the rope over his bum and around his back legs - he was better tonight and really started to relaxed with the rope on him as we walked round, lots of licking and chewing.