Saturday 31st January

Today with Blossom I played a little online to get her focus on me and then we moved on to playing at liberty in the round pen. But today there was a couple of men chopping down a tree just outside the arena and the noise of this was worrying Blossom a little, so I though it would be a good idea to have the string around her neck and the rope attached to this so I still had a little control over her if she got really worried.

Today I didn’t want to go through all seven games again with her as the first 4 are really good, so I don’t ant to bore her by doing them all every time we go in the round pen. So today we just worked on the send in the circling game, as again today she only wanted to go the the right and trying to get her to go to the left was sometimes difficult. So I tried to brake the game down by starting with just asking her to go backwards and then come back to me, the next time I might send her on a circle but then very quickly disengage her and bring her back. I played around with this for quite a while and this really got her attention on me as she never knew what I was going to do next and in the end I was able to end her in either direction without any problems at liberty. So I think I will continue to do this over the next few days and try and make a positive pattern from it. We also played with squeeze game and today was much better than yesterday, so I was really happy about that.

I then saddled, again with the balance saddle and today again she was lovely to ride!! Today we played with circling around blocks, moving from one block to the other by going sideways. We also played with the figure of eight pattern, doing circles around each block before going back to the other.

We then played with cantering in circles around the blocks and she was really good and very soft and relaxed. So seen as everything was going so well I decided to give my simple lead changes a go, I thought it would be better for me and Blossom if we done it on a figure of eight pattern as we both know this really well. So to prepare us for it I done the pattern again in trot and asked her to stop in the middle of the two blocks as this is where I would like to come back to trot before picking up the new canter lead. This went really well, so we done it in canter and this went much better than I expected it too and we were able to canter come back to trot and the pick up canter in the other direction without any problems and the most important part was she stayed calm through the whole thing. So I finished on that for the day, seen as she had done so well.

Today with Smarty my main focus was playing with change of direction on the circle, to start with he was really running through the pressure. So I put myself against the wall, so if he didn’t yield to the pressure he would hit the wall. He soon worked out what I was asking of him and really focused on me and was waiting for what he was going to be asked to do next.

I then decided to give liberty a go as we haven’t done any yet and I wasn’t sure if he would stay with me or leave - well only one way to find out!!

I went into the round pen and took his halter off and started playing friendly game to start with and then we played stick to me only in walk, stand and back up. This went well for our first time, and he didn’t think about leaving. So I thought I would give the seven games a go and see what happened. Well we only managed to do porcupine which went very well, but then the guys started chopping down the trees again and this really spooked Smarty and he left. But much to my surprise he came back to me very quickly, so I played some friendly game with him and then put his halter back on as with the noise of the trees fallen was really loud. So I didn’t think this would be the best time to test my liberty skills with him, but I was really happy with what I was able to do with him it was far more than I thought we would be able to do!!