Tuesday 9th September

Today the weather was horrible and I didn’t think there was any chance of me getting out to play with Blossom. But somebody must be looking out for me because as soon as I got to the stables the rain stopped and the sun came out – I couldn’t believe my luck!!

So I headed out to the field and Blossom caught me really well and lowered her head really nice to be haltered. After playing friendly game we heading down the field to play yo yo over a pole. I started with me standing quite close to the pole and gradually moved backwards until I was 22ft away it took a lot of approach and retreat. But tonight was the best she has ever done this task, usually she goes straight until the last couple of strides then goes squint, but tonight she was straight all the way!!

We then moved on to playing figure of 8 round two cones – I kept the cones quite close together to try and get her used to the pattern. We started at walk, but she got herself all worked up and wanted to trot off so I had to be really firm and try and stick to the pattern. Very quickly she got the idea of the pattern, but would still sometimes stop and pull back when I tried to draw her in around a cone. (very similar to what she was doing on Jackies course) But tonight I would give to her pulling and she learnt not to pull at the pressure – she was the able to walk and trot the pattern really nicely so I stopped at that. I hope to try and use this pattern more in our play as I think it will be a really good one for Blossom.

Next we moved on to squeeze game over poles, she was very good and we managed to have slack in the line most of the time. I wanted to then put it up to a jump but thought it would be better for her to go and play with something else then come back to this, so I wasn’t making it too much about the jump.

So I moved on to circles, which were a total disaster tonight I struggled to even get two laps without her stopping, leaping or changing direction and taking off. I tried several times to bring her back, play friendly and then re send her. But I was just getting the same results… So I decided to forget the circles as I couldn’t find a way to help her and didn’t want to make things worse.

To calm things down I played with holding her tongue, needle prep and smell your tail. All of this went really well so I thought it would be better just to leave everything else for the night and finish on a good note as it was starting to get dark. I really wanted to go back and play with the jump, but going with her reaction to circles I didn’t think this would be such a good idea.

I then brought her up to the stables to wash her back leg as she has a small cut on it, nothing serious. I used this as an opportunity to play squeeze game in and out of the stables as she still has issues about these. She was good and was able to stand inside with the door open for about 15 minutes while I was talking to someone. Then walking her back to the field I found out she is heavily in season!! One of the horses in the other field came to the fence to see her and I struggled to keep her walking to get her to the field. So this might have been the reason for some of our problems tonight in our play session, think she was like this before when she was in season. But apart from our few little problems I felt we had quite a good night and made some good progress in some of the tasks.