Casual Friday

My friend and I met up at Magnolia Sands yesterday morning for a fun little pop around. Per our usual adventure style, I didn't give the best directions and she ended up passing the entrance. The sign had also acquired a lot of vegetation and there was a truck blocking it, so she was doomed to fail on that one. It was her first XC school with her new Irish dude and since Butterball had worked his tail off doing dressage on Thursday, I wanted to keep it low key as well. Plus, y'know, it's roughly five million degrees + five million percent humidity, so the heat index is something special these days. 

Both boys were super brave about the sights - including a new barn that housed longhorns in the corner of the field. Butterball has schooled here before, I think, but I've never ridden him here. There are sometimes a lot of things to see... pasos on one side, baby horses/donkeys/mules, cows in tree lines, etc. But as said, both boys were just excellent. 

And Butterball was just amazing. I rode him in his double jointed happy mouth and never felt like I needed more. He was easy to the fences and just popped over everything. We got one deep spot to a bench where I kinda thought we should've taken the long, but he was all "Nah, mom, we don't have enough energy for that" and he was right. But he was dead honest over the half coffin, which can be spooky because the ditch is in a little valley. We had done it properly and popped over the ditch both directions before presenting it as a half coffin, but I was still impressed. We're starting to ask the tougher questions with combinations, and he took the jump into the water easy peasy as well. 

I'll save ya'll from the blurry screenshots this go round and just share almost all of what we did this morning. I'm going to sound like a broken record, but he's just the coolest creature. 

In the afternoon he got to play pony for my friend and her 7 and 3 year old kiddos. We grew up riding together; her mom was my riding instructor. But she's gotten out of horses for the most part. Until a year ago she did still have her QH that I learned to ride on when I was EIGHT! He was on lease to a family about 1.5 hours from where she lives. So her older son had spent some time with horses, but rather infrequently. Butterball seemed to love the attention from him though. Her older kiddo is a really gentle soul and rather than pulling for grass, Butterball just stood and got a relaxed sleepy look while he brushed him. Then we popped kiddo up on his back in the bareback pad and led him around the ring. At first he was holding on with his heels which led to a kinda confused face from BB, but after a few minutes he realized he was just to ignore that. And we got the kiddo to sit up and relax his leg down. Then it was just happy, relaxed faces from both of them. It was precious. My friend called him a Breyer pony, which fits him perfectly. He got well paid for his time with plenty of low sugar cookies, so I don't think he was too upset about two "rides" in one day. I seriously could not adore this horse more. To go from popping around some new questions cross country to being a kid's pony in the same day? Absolutely priceless.