Saturday 15th March

Today I went out to play with Blossom with the hope of riding her as the ground was better than it has been in weeks.

We started our session in the school as I wanted to try and work on the porcupine and driving games. We have still been having problems with this as Blossom still tends to walk away more than pivot. But the problem disappeared in the school and both games were really good – I think the problem could be because this is the first games I usually play when we go out after friendly of course. I think her attention isn’t on me enough and she is still too interested in eating the grass than listening to me. So I think Il try and start playing these games in the middle of our session when we are out on grass and see if that makes a differnce.

After playing circling and yo yo games, which were both good we moved back out to the field to play as the surface in the school wasn’t very good. We started with playing stick to me, which was good but I need to start doing more on her right side as she isn’t as confident on this side.

We then played with sideways again, to the right was good and we good some really nice sideways. But still had lots of problems to the left.. At one point she actually started coming to me sideways instead of going away from me, which she did get some praise for!! After that we did get some sideways to the left which she done really well. But we are still nowhere ready to move away from the fence yet.
We then played with circling game and decided just to play with getting the draw into better, without sending her in a different direction or anything. She seems to have lost her confidence a little on the circle as she seems to always be looking out, so I hope to help get her confidence back before asking for anything else again.

I then saddled and girthed in three stages, then got on. We just stood and ate some grass to start with before asking her to go, we started with just walking round the field. She seemed really relaxed and stopped to eat grass quite a lot. So we moved to a drier part of the field and started doing circles at trot, she got really impulsive at some points and started cantering but came back to trot quite quickly. I still felt I wasn’t on my balance point and tried going into a pushing position, but this caused Blossom to go even quicker and ended up in a really fast canter!! The ground was still too wet for me to feel safe to bend her to a stop incase she fell, so I used the suspension rein or something very similar to try and slow her down. And wow it worked, I really felt her hindquaters come under her and got a lovely few strides of canter and yes I felt as if I was on my balance point and really safe and relaxed. So maybe it is something to do with Blossom’s impulsion that is causing me problems with my position, maybe not?? We played about for a bit longer and nearer the end we got some nice circles in trot without me having to hold the reins tight, but still I can’t give her totally loose reins or she takes off. But overall I felt it was quite a good session, we even managed a few flying changes in canter. They weren’t really meant but she done them really good.