Wednesday 21st January

Well today Smarty was so much better, if I wasn’t looking for something to be wrong with him I wouldn’t have noticed anything so I was so happy to see there was nothing wrong with him. I am sure he was maybe a little sore still and maybe stiff, but it is nothing serious and he wasn’t lame in walk or trot so that was the main thing.

Today it was planned for Eddy’s niece to come and play and ride Smarty and I did think about not letting her because of his injury yesterday, but then I thought it might actually be good for him to get out and walk about and if his muscles were stiff the light exercise would help.



Daisy and Smarty


Circling game


Extreme Friendly, with Smarty standing on the pedestal


Extreme Friendly


Eddy and Daisy playing circling game with Smarty and Salo

Daisy then did have a little ride on Smarty but there was a lot of shooting going on today, so we didn’t think it was very safe for Daisy to be riding just incase Smarty did get a fright .

So as she couldn’t do much riding with Smarty I let her play with Blossom for a bit on line and she played all seven games and also with Blossom lots of extreme friendly game and really seemed to enjoy it.


Daisy and Blossom

Once Daisy left I played with Blossom at liberty around the arena and she was really focused on me and really connected to my energy. So I decided to ride her bareback with just the Savvy string around her neck and she was so calm and relaxed. I started with ride the rail and made sure I was able to stop her with just the string and also to check my back up, all that went really well so we played with the figure of eight pattern in walk and trot.

Eddy then came into the arena and was totally amazed to see me riding her like this considering how badly the first ridden session had went yesterday. He then helped me work on moving the FQ and the HQ, to start with it was worse than normal as I only had the SS and the CS instead of the halter so this made things a lot more difficult. But I worked away with it and very quickly I was able to move the FQ and the HQ. In a way I think it was actually good for me to do it like this as I had to be more careful with my aids and were I positioned my body and by the end it seemed to make a lot more sense to me.

Well as everything was going so well I decided to try cantering like this, nobody else was in the arena so I knew if it all went wrong at least I wasn’t going to run into another horse or person! But it went really good I was so surprised by this, we only cantered a few strides as Blossom offered to stop so of course I took this from her. I played with this a few times in each direction and it all went really well, so I was so happy!!