Tuesday 23rd September

Last night I didn’t play with Blossom and decided to take the dogs a long walk instead. I used this time to think about what I have been doing with Blossom and what I would like to be doing with her. How can I break these tasks down to the basics and work on them, instead of just trying to make the whole task work. This really helped me and I have now wrote a list of the things I think I need to do to help Blossom and what games we can start to play to make things more fun and interesting.

Tonight we started with lots of friendly game moving around all the zones, paying special attention to zone 3 as lately every time I go in this zone and face her I want her to go sideways and I do feel she is a little unconfident with me there. I then moved on to playing with extreme friendly game.

I then drove her from zone 3 over to the fence and played friendly game again in zone 3 while she was facing the fence. I went slowly through my phases to ask for sideways, we went near enough the whole way up the fence until I felt she was soft without any brace. I must have choose the right place to stop as I got lots of licking and chewing once I stopped her. I then did the exact same on the other side.

We then played with circles; we had lots of crazy spells during this. Stopping, leaping, pulling, but tonight instead of stopping and not doing anything about this I worked her through it. And it worked after what seemed like forever she started trotting round with her head low and blowing out, so I stopped her at that. I was really happy with this result!

We then played with Yo yo game over a pole, tonight she was really good going backwards and her draw was great. We then continued to play with yo yo game with other obstacles. It was really fun for both of us I think as it gave us more variety in our play and challenged us more. It has also let me see where Blossom’s thresholds are, so I now know what areas we need to work on.

Squeeze game was next and again instead of just focusing on getting her to jump a jump we played with lots of different obstacles, between me and an object, between fillers, between barrels, over poles, between poles, over a tarp and lastly over the jump.

We then saddled, which went very well and she was really good at lowering her head to let me bridle her.
I then mounted and checked my lateral flexion, everything was fine so I decided to go into the round pen and follow the rail. I had to make a few corrections to start with but then she was very good, so I decided to have a passenger lesson. Walk was great, trot she seemed to have a few RB moments always at the same place in the corral so she would canter there and continue for a lap or two. Normally I would have corrected her and brought her back to trot but tonight I thought I would just go with her a see what happened, which seemed to work well as she soon trotting round again. Going in the other direction she was much better and we even had a lovely canter. She was a little worried to start with but really settled after a few strides, it felt really good to ride.

I then felt she was really safe and headed up the field to where the poles are to work on our figure of eight pattern (no longer a task, its now just a pattern to me!!) It actually went really well tonight, we started in walk and once I felt she was calm enough I asked for trot. To start with trot was quite fast with a lot of brace, but tonight I really stuck to the pattern and wasn’t going to finish until she was able to control herself. Well I think we must have done around 20+ changes of directions around the markers with circles either end until she was able to control herself and stay in a nice trot on the pattern. She even lowered her head and started blowing out and licking and chewing!! So we stopped at that and went for a walk round the field to cool her off, as she was sweaty after all that work. While walking round I also added in some 9 step back ups, she is getting the idea of these now and is soon as I lift my reins I can feel her starting to stop.

Tonight I really enjoyed myself and I think Blossom did too. What I need to remember about playing with Blossom is she needs a lot of time with one game/pattern until she softens and realizes what she is suppose to be doing otherwise she doesn’t learn anything. I seem to expect her just to be able to do all these things without really not spending much time on the basic stuff – well that’s another lesson learnt today!!