Monday 16th February

Today I played with Blossom online again with the 45f line, it went better today than it did the other day. I didn’t seem to get tangled as often, but I still need a lot of practice with it. I also made the 12ft line into reins and left them on her when we played to see if this will help her confidence about me riding her with reins..

So today we played with:

1. Lots of friendly games
2. Driving from zone 5 to objects - which went very well
3. Sideways towards obstacles and sometimes sideways over or around them
4. Circling game - very nice and soft today!
5. Change of direction at trot
6. Sideways along the wall with my feet still - she can go to about 20ft, but then she stops at turns and looks at me.
7. Sideways over a barrel - left side is great, but she still has problems with me on the right side
8.Circling over a jump - Blossom found this quite difficult as she always thought it was a squeeze game and would stop, turn and face after the jump and would then try and jump the opposite way. So it took about 4/5 jumps for her to get the idea that she was to keep circling - so this was quite interesting to see how difficult she found this.. Also after the first jump the reins went up in the air when she jumped and this really spooked her - so I think she really does have an issue with the reins or is this maybe normal for a horse to spook at this. So to try and avoid making the problem she seems to have with reins etc even worse, I put an elastic surcingle around her and loped the reins through this to stop them moving around and going up her head. I also thought this would be good for her as the reins were now in a more fixed position so it was like when I would ride her and had a light contact so this would be good for her.


I then played a little at liberty before mounting bareback, and today we worked on steering with the savvy string. As lately I have really noticed how much I rely on my CS to steer and ideally I would love to have more power steering using just the string. It actually went quite well and she was soon yielding from the string to turn and I therefore wasn’t having to use my CS so often, so this felt really good and I will continue to really work with this to get her really soft.

I then saddled and we started with playing friendly game with the SS in her mounth as Marieke had mentioned yesterday that I could try riding her with just the string. But before I can do that I need her to be confident with the string in her mouth and be able to hold the string herself instead of trying to spit it out all the time.
We the played with circling round the block and again today the main focus was getting her to circle with less corrections, and after our session bareback I found I was able to correct her with the string instead of always using the CS so this was nice. I then put the cradle bridle on her and done a little passenger lesson with this in and then just played some friendly games with the reins to try and help her become more confident. But what I did notice today is she does appear to be more confident with the bridle/bit than she is with just the halter, so that was quite interesting as I would have expected the opposite.