Tuesday 24th June

Tonight I decided to go and play with Blossom as I haven’t had the time the last couple of weeks to play with her as much as I would have liked to.
We started our session with playing the seven games with the stable, Kathleen looked after the ponies for me at the weekend and had problems getting Blossom into the stable. So I thought this would be a good thing to start with, we started with friendly in the stable and the on to game 2 and 3. We then played yo yo up to the doorway and then I asked her to go back a couple of steps again. I would have liked to have got her to yo yo through the doorway and back again, but she isn’t confident with this sort of task yet so didn’t think this would help her gain more confidence in the stable. We then played squeeze game through the stable door, she did find this quite difficult to start with but was soon walking in and out really calm. So we moved on to playing squeeze game between the stable and me and then moved on to sideways along the row of stables. She was so calm, so I asked her to squeeze back into the stable and then played lots of friendly with her.

We then went out to play in the field, it was really heavy rain so we didn’t do very much as we were both soaked!
We started with circling game, the circles are getting so much softer now with lots of slack in the rope. So we worked a little on change of direction and transitions, everything went quite well we managed a really nice steady canter at one point that I was really happy about.
We then played squeeze game over a jump – it was only about 2ft high, but Blossom had problems with this. So I put one side down so it would be easier for her to cross – I could really see how much she was trying. She would lift her front leg and think about putting it over the pole and would also sometimes stop and put her foot on the pole. So we done lots of approach and retreat and I worked really hard to make sure I noticed all her trys and reward her for them. By the end she was quite confident walking over the poles in both directions, so I then put it back up to the jump and played circling game over the jump. She was quite good but I could still see she wasn’t very confident so after jumping each direction a few times I brought her back in to me and played lots of friendly with her and then finished for the night.