Sunday 1st February

Today we had an hour in the morning to play with our horses as we had a couple of girls from the local school come for work experience and they helped us with the mucking out and all the other chores so we were finished a little earlier than normal.

So I decided to play with Smarty, I started with doing lots of driving from 3 and 4 to objects. This really seems to be building his self confidence up as at the start he was always really worried to walk first.
I then played with circling game and today I worked on getting the circles softer and also worked on change of direction again. Today the changes were much better than they were yesterday and he was more focused on me from the start, so this was really good.
We finished with him standing on the pedestal and today he offered to put one of his back feet on, I was very impressed and then he walked over letting both back feet touch!

Today with Blossom I started on line and started with just warming up and getting her focus on me, we then moved on to playing with circling game. To start with we played around with the send, to get this really good so when we come to do it at liberty it will be more clear to her what I expect from her. We then moved on to playing with change of direction, which went very well and we also got some changes in canter too! We then played with transitions and today I played with using the CS to ask for downward transitions, so it will be clearer to Blossom what I want when we play with this at liberty. Just now I am able to do upward transitions and then downward from canter to trot just by lowering my energy, but I can’t get her to come back to walk.. So I thought teaching her to do this with the CS is a good idea.

We then went into then round pen to play a little at liberty today we only played with circling, sideways and squeeze games. Today everything just went so well, we had no problems and she was totally stuck to me and didn’t even think about leaving! I was so impressed with her and I think all the preparation over the last couple of days playing with the string round her neck has really paid off.
I then jumped on her with the intention of riding circles round the block, but instead I ended up just sitting on her for about half and hour watching others playing. This was great for Blossom for me to get on her a just do nothing, but for me it wasn’t so good as it was freezing today!!

When I eventually managed to get myself of her I decided to saddle her and ride her to warm both of us up. Today we played with the same pattern as yesterday and everything went really well, and again she was calm and relaxed. Eddy even commented how nice the canter was!! So we finished with again me just sitting on her spending some undemanding time with her, during this she done lots of licking and chewing and even yawned a few times.