Thursday, March 13, 2014

I have confidence that spring will come again



In my second life (the non-horsey one), I'm working on a production of the Sound of Music.  One of the more recent additions to the show is the song 'Confidence' from the movie version as a whole ensemble musical number, so it's been running through my head a lot, and now it seems even more appropriate with the return of what feels like real spring weather at last!

So needless to say I finally get to make a happy, excited blog post again! Yay! I've missed those! It's been a bit of discouragement and slow, slow, painfully slow progress for a while now, but I finally have something happy and exciting to report!

But I'll get to that.  I arrived yesterday at the farm to a very water-saturated yard, and a dirty horse.

I see a dirty horse

"Where?"

"Oh.  You meant me, didn't you? Rude.  You try keeping clean in that pasture."
She was just covered with what seemed to be sweat stains.  She's still retaining a lot of her winter hair (I don't blanket, so she has puh-lenty of that), and I tried the shedding blade, but it's just not ready to come out yet.  Oh well, we'll both be full of her hair soon enough when she sheds out.  Anyhow, she stood really quite well while she was tied, and I tacked her up without any fuss (a big improvement! she always used to wiggle around).

We headed into the arena, and I had another engagement later in the evening, so I didn't have an exceptionally long time to work with her.  Because of that, I decided not to concentrate too much on anything specific, because I didn't want to bring out any issues that I wouldn't have the time to deal with properly.  I had a bit of a play day, or a I like to think of it, a crash course.  I did a little taste of all the exercises we've been working on lately, only doing them once or twice per side until I got an really good try out of her, and then moving on.  She was backing, moving her shoulders, her hind end, and bending around a barrel with changing directions and rolling through her shoulders, all like a superstar.  She also did great with the new exercise we started at our last lesson, which involves taking the rope over the seat of the saddle and doing lateral flexion, and once she's got that down, bending her head around and then asking for her to move her shoulders and turn on her hind end.  There was a little resistance on her harder side (moving her shoulders over to the right), but she did almost an entire circle to the left when I had only asked for one step! What a good girl!

Of course the real main event came next....

Ta-da!
 Unfortunately, I didn't have my usual camera, so I had to use my phone.  It looks very much like there was a big smudge on the lense, which would be the cause of the weird haze on the pictures, but it doesn't matter.  I finally, finally got to get back on my horse! Yay!



These were the best of all the pictures we took
 I started off on the ground bending her head my direction and jumping on the ground, pulling on the saddle a tiny bit.  She took that fairly well, so I started jumping around with my foot in the stirrup, and then I laid across her back, as you can see in the last two photos.  She took that no problem, so I got the rest of the way up, and worked on getting on and off both sides equally.  She did awesome! I didn't want to push too much, and I was almost out of time, so I didn't ask for anything else, just standing for mounting.  Nonetheless I am super excited about this big step towards being back to normal!  Spring here we come!


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