Friday 14th March

Today I had the farrier coming out to shoe Blossom and Aicha so I decided to go out and play with Blossom before he came.
We started with yo yo game and had to work a bit on the straightness and she still tends to swing her bum out to the right. But with just a little correction she is now able to go backwards and straight really well. My draw today wasn’t very good, so I spent so time trying to improve this which seemed to work as I managed to get her to trot to me. We then played with the squeeze game over jumps – I got some amazing sends from her from the left!! She would go from standstill to canter straight to the jump and would then stop turn and face me at the other end, I was really happy. To the right she wasn’t as confident and I had to make sure I lined her up to the jump really well or she would go to the side instead of jumping. This has always been the more difficult side for Blossom, but the change in her already is amazing.

We then moved on to circling, after checking both directions were good. We moved on to play with transitions on the circle. She was really good, she stopped a few times when I first started asking her to slow down but soon got the idea of what I was asking her to do. We managed to go up and down all three gaits, its still quite messy but I was really happy with what we managed to do as I haven’t really done very much work with this before.

We then went and played sideways with the fence, I haven’t been playing with this very much and it showed.. She was quite good going to the right but going to the left she really lost her confidence and didn’t know what to do. It was like being back at the start of level 1 again. But we managed to get a few steps in both directions, so decided that was enough for today but we will need to do a lot more work on this from now on.

We finished with playing stick to me round the field and also a little work on my draw I would run backwards away from her and she got the idea quite quickly that she was to run to me and she would then get a treat!

Later I got a little demo from Kris and Iona on suspension rein, as I have been reading Cathy’s blog and noticed that this was mentioned a lot but I didn’t have a clue what it was. So after Kris showing me what it was, everything is now a lot clearer in my head. I also got a little shot of Iona, as I was telling Kris I was having problems finding my balance point on Blossom.. As soon as I sat on Iona I felt straight away I was on my balance point and felt really secure I even got a little trot round and it felt great. Think I need to have a look at my saddle and see if that is maybe my problem or it could just be im not relaxed enough to find my balance point as Im too busy trying to keep Blossom calm – lots to think about!!

Thanks Kris and Iona for your help much appreciated!!