Barn Day

After a busy week, it was nice to have a day to hang out with the horses! First order of business was getting Ginger's feet trimmed up:

This is the traumatized look she adopts every farrier appointment. The farrier loved Ginger's  new princess halter too!

She was good, and for the first time in three years we were able to use a hoof stand! The backstory to that is once a very long time ago, she yanked a hoof back and the stand fell underneath her and she tripped all over it and scared herself. Because this is Ginger, ever since just the sight of one near a farrier makes her break out in a sweat and get all panicky. Of course it's fine if I put her feet on and in things, she's a Welsh Cob and the default behaviour is to try to get her front feet on anything interesting. It's when the farrier does it it's a big deal! She's pretty smart and has a memory like an elephant. So, today, at last, my horse acted like an adult for the farrier. We win. Our goals are slightly different than normal people lol.  

Next up, I took both the girls up to the ring for an outing. I've been really slack about taking them both out together for quite a while now, so I was pretty happy that they walked up the road politely on either side of me like it was a totally normal thing to do. Ginger has such excellent manners it's no big deal to take her anywhere - it's actually Bridget who I thought might be the troublemaker and take advantage of the fact my attention was somewhat divided.  

The focus on this one is funny - it looks like I photoshopped her on a background. She was really there, I swear :)

Ginger got a quick lunge and a short ride and was good, although still feeling very rusty. We just did some 20m circles and spirals walk and trot plus a few transitions, a short canter and some leg yields. None of it was perfect, beyond the surprisingly lovely canter, but with Ginger you just have to recognize her efforts and encourage her and she'll come back out the next day better. If you start picking at her she loses confidence very quickly and gets panicky. I think if I can stay consistent we'll be back where we left off in short order. As always, she tried very hard to be a good girl and I can't ask for more than that. When we were done, I tied her in the corner of the arena and she waited very quietly and patiently for me to work with Bridget, which is a huge improvement over the acrobatics of the Ginger of old. I'm feeling a lot more confident about bringing her along for lessons since our test run today went so well. I was intimidated at the thought of getting two horses ready and bringing them both up the road together for lessons without a helper, but I don't think I need to be.

Proud of herself. Never mind the crazy mane, I'm just glad it's finally growing back!

Bridget just ended up getting lunged. I had another great ride on her a couple of days ago and really felt like I made big steps fixing our recent issues with forward, Today when I asked her to trot out she did so with zero nagging, no lunge whip even necessary. I asked for a canter and she obliged. To the right (her tricky side), when I asked for the canter she thought about using the wrong lead for half a stride, then before I could correct her she did a nice flying change and gave me another really nice canter. Huge praise for that as she's really been struggling with that side and tends to just try to quit on you rather than try. Rather than tempt fate, I just called it a day and told her what a good pony she is.

Pony had some go!

All in all, a good barn day. Little Midge needs to learn to share my attention with her big sister Ginger. She's such a busybody she can't handle being left out, but she did very well for a baby pony being left somewhat unsupervised.

Ginger being all cute and patient, although she wasn't overly impressed with borrowing Bridget's tiny halter.