Wednesday 11th February

Today Eddy’s niece was coming to play with Smarty again so while I was waiting for her to arrive I decided to give played with both the ponies a go. Today this went much better than it ever has done when I have tried this before, we started with playing friendly game and they both stood realy well nice and relaxed. We the played yo yo game, they didn’t both go back at the same speed but they both went backwards and I was able to draw them both to me at trot! We then played circling game and this went better than the last tome we tried, I was able to have them both trotting on a circle and even over a jump. But what I did find was Smarty wouldn’t go first on the circle he had to be the one following, I found this out after we managed to do a lovely change of direction. Lastly we played with sideways, this went so well and Eddy even commented how well it went!

Daisy then arrived and took over playing with Smarty for me, so today with Blossom we played with:

1.Circling game still working on getting them really soft and her looking in onto the circle
2. Sideways to obstacles
3. Sideways towards me, this went much better today I am still playing with it against the wall but we are now able to do a few steps towards me from a very low phase.
4. Sideways over a block - I have tried to do this a few times with her before but I always thought she was unconfident so therefore didn’t push her and just left the task. But what I have found out in the last couple of weeks from what Eddy has done with her or what he has told me to do with her is she actually is being dominant more than scared so therefore I need to use more pressure to get the response I want. So today I decided to try using more pressure on her and go through my phases until she did yield sideways or even make a slight try as what she has done previously has either not moved or moved away from the block. So it took quite a lot of time today to do this task but in the end putting the extra pressure on her seemed to work and once she worked out all I wanted her to do was to go sideways over the block, she done it with ease. So I will continue to play with this to really make sure she is confident and then we can start playing with this with other objects.

I then mounted bareback and rode with just the string, today we played with circles and the figure of eight pattern. She was going really well today so I thought I would see if I was able to jump her like this, there was a very small jump set up so we decided to give that a go. It went so much better than I expected it too,!! She managed to stayed calm and relaxed and trotted nicely to the jump, done a lovely jump and once landed she done a few strides of canter but then stopped as soon as I asked her. I was so happy! So after doing this a few times in each direction I finished as I didn’t want to risk making her impulsive, so we finished by spending some undemanding time together.