Sunday 9th December

The weather on Saturday was horrible, so I wasn't able to do anything with Blossom - I got soaked just coming up from the field with her!
Sunday morning wasn't much better, but when I went back over in the afternoon to bring the ponies in it had stopped raining so I thought I would make the most of it. I put her saddle on in the stable, she was quite grumpy about this. I think I will need to start doing this more often and just leave her with the saddle on, so she can start to think of it more as a nice thing rather than a bad thing.

We went out to the field and had a play with the seven games, she had some problems with the squeeze game. So we done work on that, squeezing through jump fillers, squeezing past me and a fence. Once she was more confident with that, we moved on to squeezing over a jump. I think the problem might have been because she had the saddle on, think il need to do more work on this to get her confident with it.
I then done yo yo's through the jump fillers, I'm trying to work on her confidence backing up to objects. As I think this is one of the reasons she has problems with trailer loading, as she doesn't like it when I put the back bar up. So hopefully if I can get her confident outside the trailer in this zone, she will be confident in the trailer..
I then went into the school and done a little bit of work on my lateral flexion before I mounted. Once I was on I just sat there for a few minutes rubbing her, then done a bit of pushing passenger. We done some work with her back up, I was really happy that we got a couple of steps backwards. Usually she just pushes into the pressure and goes forward. We then tried to get some sideways using a fence, she didn't understand what I was asking her to do so I got my cs to help her by driving the zones away. She was good and we got a few steps in both directions. She still seemed quite calm so we done some trot, to start with she was fine and stayed relaxed. But it didn't take very long for her to loose her confidence and become more RB again. I used lateral flexion to try and calm her, but it didn't work to well as soon as she went forward again she was trying to go faster! I had recently watched the ss dvd on impulsion and got some great ideas from that to use on her when she goes RB. But typical I couldn't remember any of it - my mind went totally blank. So instead I just jumped off and played with her on the ground to get her confidence back before we finished as it was getting dark.