Saturday 17th January

Well this morning we had a lady arrive with her horse for 2 days of horsemanship lessons with Eddy, but I didn’t watch very much of her as it really wasn’t that interesting! (That sounds terrible, oops)

This afternoon I started playing with Blossom and we started with having a little play with some of the games to get her focus on me and then we moved on to playing with circles. The main focus today was getting her to look where she was going and not to lean on the rope, as Eddy now thinks it is time that I ask for a little more from her and this would be a massive change for her if she is able to do this. So to get her to do this I worked with small circles to start with and would move her sideways on the circle to get her focus more on me and where she is going, once it was better at a short distance I would allow the circles to get bigger. But if she started pulling or looking out I would make the circles smaller again as this way I can use the CS and string to move her sideways as if she is out on a bigger circle I can’t touch her and she just ignores me!

We then played with all the other tasks we have been playing with lately and everything went really well today. The best bit was she managed to get all 4 feet on the pedestal, I was so happy for her and she has been trying so hard to work out what she has to do to get all her feet up there and today she got it!! She only managed to stay there for about 4 seconds, before she fell off so it wasn’t long enough for me to get a photo. But now that she has done it once I am sure she will be able to do it again and maybe next time I will be able to get a photo for you all to see!!

I then saddled and today again she was lovely to ride, strange!! Today I was able to do transitions from walk, trot, stand and back up only using the savvy string - Marieke was watching and I think she was shocked to see me being able to do this with Blossom!! Today I decided to give cantering a go and use my new position to see if it made a difference to Blossom.. Well the first few canters were really good and I think the new position really helped as the transition was really smooth and there wasn’t her usual really fast trot before canter, so I think this also helped me to really stay back and on my balance point and therefore also helped her keep her weight more on her HQ. So I was really happy, but on our last canter she was more impulsive. But we think this could have been caused by something spooking her as a lot of the horses were quite jumpy today, especially on the side where I was riding…
Eddy asked if I had ever tried cantering bareback and if that made a difference to Blossom because my seat might also be different. I am sure I have cantered her bareback, but at the time I didn’t really think about is she better or worse than normal. So I decided to give it a go today and see what the result would be.. But I think for safety reasons for me and everyone else in the arena Eddy put me on line and played with Blossom with me riding bareback. But I am not sure it really made much difference to Blossom as she was I would say faster on line with me bareback in canter than she was before.. But I think I will continue to try and ride bareback more often as I do feel I need to improve me seat more as a few times bareback I did loose my balance, nothing too serious but to Blossom I think if I can really stay with her it will really help her to stay calm!

Today with Smarty we had lots of fun playing on line and everything is just getting so much better, today we were playing with change of direction and it is really quite good!!

I then saddled and girthed in stages and then played with transitions in walk, trot, stand and back up - his back up wasn’t great today as I have now put a bit back on him he still has a tendency to lean on the bit rather the yield from the pressure. So we played around teaching him to be soft and not to lean on the bit and everything was going really well.
So I decided to canter and this is where the problems started, the transitions were good but the problem was when I went to turn him to do a half circle around the arena he just lifted his head and sort of ran sideways… During this I had no control over him whatsoever!! I done another couple of circles and every time he done it and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do, I tried to turn him using the reins and also using my body to try and turn him but nothing worked!!

Corine was in the arena, so I asked her to watch and see what she thought - but she had no idea and thought it was quite an extreme behaviour for no reason, well of course there is a reason but it wasn’t an obvious one and I wasn’t asking any new or challenging things from him. So I got Corine to film it for me on my camera so I could watch it and also so I could show Eddy to see what he thought the problem was.

This afternoon we also had a lady arrive with a quarter horse and a Shetland pony and she will be staying for a week for horsemanship lessons. We also had another horse arrive that is here for about a month for Eddy to do a restart on. So this will be really interesting to watch!!