I hope you all had a lovely, peaceful, warm Thanksgiving.
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| Delicious pie. I slacked and did store bought crust and in spite of par baking it, it was still a bit underdone when the pie was definitely done. |
Butterball got a gymnastics session. It was carefully curated to shape his style over fences and fight the dying on landing that we would both like to do. He started out pretty lackadaisical over the fences, but by the time the oxer at the end got bigger, he was putting in some real effort. PW helped me out by telling me at what points to add leg and at what points to let the exercise itself do the work.
The exercise started with two bounce rails then two bounce cavaletti then one stride to a vertical. We built the vertical up a little bit while pony pants sorted out his feet over the bounces and I sorted out WAITING for the spot to come to me. Then we added a one stride to another vertical then two strides to an oxer. As the oxer got bigger his effort over the smaller earlier fences also improved interestingly enough. I have seen enough videos of myself cantering lately that I felt the need to put some thought into my lower leg as we cantered around. It seemed to help some, but there is still plenty of work to do. It was easier to work on my position over fences through the grid, so this was a nice tie in to the last lesson where I felt kinda loose and incorrect with my position a lot of the time.
We ended with one run through at a slightly lower height to build his confidence and focus on straightness. This lesson was so good for both of us. The concepts we've been working on still applied: don't drop him between fences, create the canter you want way before you get to the first fence. We'll likely repeat the gymnastics in our lesson next week to solidify those concepts.
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| Headless horseman! |
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| Those little ears, those knees. Guys, how is he so perfect?? |
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