Monday 23rd February

Today the place was so busy, it was the busiest I have ever seen it - lots of people and there family and all the stables were full too!!

So any chance of playing with the ponies was going to have to be through lunch again so to make things easier for myself I decided to play with them both together and then ride Smarty and lead Blossom.

I started online with them both playing with friendly game and stick to me this went really well, so we moved on to playing with circling game. This was so much better than it was the last time I played with then both together, they were so calm and relaxed and even done a change of direction at trot. I was so impressed with this and today Smarty was happy to take the lead on the circle, whereas the last time Blossom always had to go in front.

Circling game over a jump didn’t go to good, Smarty was really good but Blossom just didn’t like the idea of jumping with Smarty so close to her.

Yo yo game was good and they both went backwards from phase one and also came back to me at trot. Sideways along the wall also was very good!!

I then mounted and we started with just following the rail in walk and then I started asking for some stop and back up transitions. Smarty was really leaning on the bit and wasn’t yielding to pressure very well so we done quite a lot of this and I was also having to use the CS to get him to yield. We the started adding trot into our transitions, but still Smarty was really leaning on the bit when I would ask for downward transitions. So I couldn’t let this go on for any longer, so I let Blossom loose in the arena and gave Smarty a really good canter as I wasn’t sure if he was leaning just because he had lots of energy. But even after the canter he still wasn’t much better so I spent quite a lot of time working with him to teach him to be soft.

I then got Blossom to catch us again and we had a lovely ride now that Smarty was so much softer and was more relaxed.