Sunday 27th July

Well yesterday while I was away at the playday the farmer cut the grass in my field for me as it was getting really long and I was struggling to find my obstacles. So today I had to go out and rebuild them all, I moved everything around and made some new ones out of what I have in the field, jumps, barrels, cones, poles, tarps, hula hoops, I also need to build myself a round pen but just didn’t have the energy to do that as well today. So that’s now on my to do list.

My sister caught Blossom for me while I was giving Bridget a bath, but as soon as she saw me I got a big neigh. It was so cute, really made me feel good.

I gave her a little groom and got her boots on her and then we headed to the field driving her from zone 5, she was really good at this but I think it helped that we were heading towards the field so she knew where we were going. But I guess this would be classed as setting myself up for success.

Anyway once in the field we started with going up the field towards the obstacles sideways, she was really bracey and I had to work really hard to get her to go sideways. But I must have choose the correct time to stop because as soon as I let her stop she licked her lips and lowered her head.

I then drove her over to the obstacles and got her to put her nose on some of the games equipment as we passed. She is getting really good at this game! We then found a nice flat bit of ground so I decided to play with circles there, we started with just plain circling game to get our HQ disengage good, just a look at the HQ done it n both directions. So we moved on to transitions walk and trot transitions were really good, canter actually wasn’t that bad either. She will go from trot to canter on phase one now, whereas before she would always just stop instead of going forward and she will come back to trot on around phase 2. But there was still so brace in canter, so we will need to work on getting her more relaxed in canter on line. But what I did notice was after cantering and coming back to trot she would lick and chew – is she starting to realise that canter isn’t going to kill her and it’s not such a scary place..
We got a couple of change of directions, but I think im going to leave this until I set my round pen up as this will give both of us a better focus. And hopefully make it easier.

We then played squeeze game over a jump, I think giving her that extra time to think after jumping the log yesterday really made a big difference as today first time she jumped without hesitation, so again she got lots of time to think and lick and chew. We then moved on to squeeze over trotting poles, again really good so I asked for circles to start with really good, soft with lots of slack in the line. But then she through a strop and decided she didn’t want to do it anymore and would stop and try and go the other direction. This is something that she has been doing quite a bit at home lately and from what I learnt from Jackie this is actually a more LB behaviour, but she the gets herself worried and it ends up RB.. How to challenge me! So today I decided I have to sort this problem out as I now feel it is becoming a learn behaviour. (Very similar to what Jackie worked on with her around the pole, she has worked out if she stops and braces I can’t physically do anything about it) Well I don’t have a pole in the field (I have asked for one) So I just decided to go with well if you want to run, run let me help you and just kept pointing her in front of obstacles as I really didn’t have any other ideas to use except quit for the day which is not going to help as this problem just keeps popping up. Well I must have ran her around for about 15mins in any direction she wanted, if she stopped and went the other way the fine but just keep going. But then I noticed her head started to lower, she came back down to a trot herself and before I knew it she was walking round on the circling licking and chewing. So I asked her in and played lots of friendly with her and finished on the good note for the night, as it was so hot I didn’t want to do too much with her. If anyone has any other ideas for this behaviour please let me know or share your experiences with me.