Sunday 15th February

Today with Blossom I played with:

1. Yo yo game improving the backwards
2. Sideways without a fence
3. Circling game, really good today she was very calm and relaxed.
4. Change of direction in trot and some simple changes in canter.
5. Shoulder in on the circle
6. Figure of eight pattern
7. Sideways over a barrel, with her left eye on me she is good but the other side she still has problems so I got Eddy to come and have a look to make sure I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But he said I was doing everything fine, but I have to remember that she isn’t made of china and I have to go through my phases and find an effective phase 4 if she isn’t making any effort to make a try. So I played around with this and she was managing to take a couple of steps but just didn’t seem to be able to go any further, so I cheated a little and placed the barrel half way under her. So if she wanted to get off she would have to jump, come sideways towards me or go sideways like I was asking her. But with the barrel half way under her it seemed to make much more sense to her what I was asking and she went sideways over on a very low phase. So I will continue to cheat a little this way until she is more confident and fully understands what I am asking as I know she does have problems with me in this eye sometimes.

I then went outside to play in the round pen, this is the first time we have ever played out here. So to start with I had to work really hard to get Blossom’s attention on me and away from the grass, but once I got it we had lots of fun. The plan was to play with all seven games but Blossom had far to much energy and play drive so I used it and we had some really nice changes of directions and an amazing draw!

We then went back into the indoor arena and I saddled and today I wanted to play with circling her around an object and try and reduce the amount of corrections I have to make to keep her on the circle. It went well, I still have to make a lot of corrections with the CS but I think if we keep playing with this and she really learns her responsibility things will really improve.