Taking Advantage

 I do enjoy watching Shanea ride Carmen. It opens my eyes to what is possible and shows her how to respond. It was important to me to take full advantage of the work Shanea had done. 

Monday the weather was much calmer.  I rode and Carmen was perfect. She went forward off the leg, was soft and listening. I was quite happy with our performance. 

I caught her spying on me when I was dragging the ring

Tuesday Julia came out to join us and we started with a hack. I've been working on Carmen's bravery out hacking so we started with her leading. At first she didn't want to head down to the woods but I sat up, put my leg on and off we marched. She led through half the hack and then we switched to Irish. Back in the ring I could feel her getting tense but instead of trying to hold her back I put my leg on and sent her forward. I also made use of Irish to draw her to some spots that she was feeling uncertain about. There was a huge blow up (on her part) at one spot in the ring and made her go forward. I am doing my best to not back down these days. During the excitement I felt her saddle shift so I had to hop off and tighten the girth. When I got back on the trouble was done. We finished with some nice canter work 

Autumn sunrises are always beautiful 

Wednesday the weather was windy and rainy and Thursday was a hard day at work and I wasn't feeling it so she had two days off in a row. 

Today was a lesson day (I have no media because I wanted to use my app to record the ride but that's a different post). The weather was beautiful- sunny and warm. We started with getting a swinging walk. It actually was pretty easy to get her into a nice walk. 

From there it was into a trot and it was going pretty nice when she gave a big sideways jump and tried to run off. But I was ready for her, got her stopped after a couple strides and marched her back to the rail to finish out figure. And that was the end. When I felt tension I put on my leg, we moved forward (but not fast). 

We worked on lengthening and shortening her stride and that is improving. As is our half-pass at trot- especially going to the right. She quite likes this work and will sometimes offer it as we come out of a corner. 

The other night I heard a kerfuffle when I was 
in the stall. I looked out to see three very innocent 
creatures who have no idea what I heard. 

We played with our turn on the haunches and those are getting so much better. After that I could feel her getting into a ball so we went from there to canter. The goal was to half-halt to get her to step under and ask for the canter so she'd lift into canter rather then fling her front legs into it. I spent some time in my own head about this making my timing awful. Of course Carmen also gets into her head so we're quite the pair sometimes. Once I stopped overthinking it we were able to make progress and we finished with some great transitions. It was one of those lessons that is just awesome from beginning to end. Not because we were perfect but because it felt like real progress. 

In exciting news we have our first egg from
one of our chickens (this one is Amy).