Sunday 9th March

Today I got up early and went over to play with Blossom again.

We started today with the first four games, everything was alot better today than it was yesterday. She was much more confident going backwards, which was great to see.
We then moved on to circling we managed to circle in both directions without any problems. Then Blossom decided she wanted to stop on the circles, it was quite funny as all I had to do was lift the rope and point in the dirction I wanted her to go and she would leap in the air and go again. I think her play drive is really starting to come out more. She just seemed so full of cheek today, it was really good to watch her.

Blossom then made up her own way of change of direction - she will stop and as soon as I look at her she goes of on the circle in the other direction. So after playing Blossom's game for a bit we went back to my game of change of direction - But I have to say Blossom's game seems to work better than mine. The problem today was when I started going backwards and drawing her into me, she just stops.. So I decided to forget the change of direction and work on getting her to come to me at trot. It was such a nice feeling to see her trotting towards me, and hopefully this will help her when we do go back to change of directions.

We then played squeeze over the jumps again, both directions were really good. I even managed to get her to stop with her front legs just over the jump, she stood there so relaxed I was very impressed so she got a treat for that.

Then we moved on to sideways with a fence, I'm trying to make sure she I ask her the same way next to a fence as I do without a fence. As when I do ask her without a fence I just seem to confuse her which isn't good.

I then saddled Blossom, then before heading into the school I let her just chill and eat some grass. After tightening her girth in three stages I got on her and just sat there for what felt like ages, but I’m sure it wasn’t any more than 5 minutes. I then asked to her to follow the rail at walk, this went really well in both direction. Her head was down nice and low and she was blowing out and licking her lips. So I thought I would try her in trot, but she became really impulsive and went into canter after only a few strides of trot, so I would bend her back to a trot. But in the end I asked her just to come back to walk and finished with just walking round. The surface in the school is terrible and she was tripping a lot so I thought it would be safer to just come back to walk. What I would have liked to do is just let her trot/canter round until it was her idea to slow down or trot – maybe another day when the weather is better we can play with riding more in the field.