Friday 6th February

Today with Blossom I started playing with her online, but I just didn’t have much imagination of what to do today. So instead I played with some stick to me and liberty and then mounted bareback, and started with a passenger lesson at walk around the arena. I then played with sideways with the two CS, and today it went very well. We then played with circling around blocks the I had placed around the arena and this went well, she was very calm and relaxed.

I then noticed her breathing was quite heavy and we hadn’t done that much work for her to be like that, so I took her outside and let her graze for about 15 minutes to see if her breathing would come back to normal. But it didn’t really improve very much so I decided just to let her rest for the rest of the afternoon.

I then rode Smarty and we started with working on getting him softer as he still leans and just has so much energy just now! We then started working on canter lead changes using the bow tie pattern and this was going quite well.

But then I had to stop as the vet was here for one of Eddy’s horses as he cut his leg and had time to micro chip the ponies while he was here. (As I need to have them micro chipped to get the export papers done to get home) But it turned out Blossom actually already has a chip (I was sure she did have) but there is no record of this is her passport, strange!! So while the vet was checking Blossom to see if she had a chip, I got him to check her breathing seen has he was here. He thinks she has a very mild case of COPD. But it could also be because of the dust in the hay, as this is the first time she has shown any signs.. So I am just to keep an eye on her over the next few days and see how she is and if she isn’t any better I can go and get some medication for her - but it is nothing serious or anything I should worry about so this made me feel better and I am glad I got her checked just to be on the safe side.

Eddy then said he would come and look at my lead changes to see if I was doing it ok, and he says I now have the idea and I am fine I just need to get Smarty to bend a little better and stop bracing against me. But by the end of playing with this Smarty was so much better and wasn’t fighting me and was much softer. So it will be interesting to see how I get on with playing with this with Blossom now that I understand what I am to do.