Rough

This week was really no fun for me outside of the barn for a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with. These are the times when I’m glad to have the boys and my husband to keep me grounded.

How can you not smile with this adorable boy around?

Monday night P and I decided to work on doing some of the things I’ve been doing in my lessons with Stampy. We worked on our bending, haunches in, shoulder in. P is a pro at his age so it’s always nice to work on myself and making sure I’m asking for things correctly and clearly so I can take it back to Stampede.

Tuesday I had my flat lesson on Stampede. He is feeling better and better each ride with my new plan. He sometimes gets grumpy about me being in his business, so I’m trying to find the balance between packaging him and letting him do his thing as long as he is working from behind. Maybe by the end of the winter we will get it together, lol.

November calendar page at work 🙂

Wednesday I had a work event in the evening, so I just made it out to do Stampede’s stretches and take the boys out to graze. Since I got the extra hours in Wednesday, I left work a bit early Thursday so I could ride both horses. Stampede was up at first since it had rained all day so he had been stuck inside. I used that to my advantage and put him to work. He really gave me some great canter work in the first direction, but then died out in the second direction. I did an easy bareback ride on P to finish up the night.

Yay for grazing while it’s still light out!

The sheet is so dirty already 🙁 

Did you catch Christie’s horse Mikey making it clear he should be outside too in the background of the last picture? He was doing all kinds of silly things to make sure I saw him.

Friday I left work a little early and rode Mr P again. Just a quick putz around in the indoor before the lessons started, nothing too exciting.

Yesterday I had my full lesson on Stampede. We worked hard on the flat, and I could tell he was getting tired, particularly in the hind end. Our first course went pretty good, although I kept picking at my distances for some reason. Second course was hit or miss, with a quality miss on the in of my last line. I had to go do that line again, and I think I must have sat too fast after the in of the line because Stampede just kind of lost his hind end for a second when he landed. Did it a third time to fix that. Spots were okay but Stampede was pretty over the whole thing and just powered down the line. Not pretty but we got it done. Stampy really does not like it when I mess up!

Today I rode P bareback out in the field with some of the barn ladies. We all had a nice spook when we walked past the pond and the birds flew out of it, but we all survived! For a second I was a bit scared one of the other ladies wasn’t going to hang on. We got everyone settled and had a nice ride outside.

Mr P loves field rides!

Stampede had his weekly lunge today. I would have loved to take video because he was moving even better than last week, but I needed both my hands to control the beast and the whip! We did have a few hairy minutes when they started scraping the driveway with the tractor just outside the indoor. Very scary! I managed to get Stampy stopped (thought I might get trampled for a minute, lol) and once he stood and listened for a minute he decided he was safe.

The cutest pups!

Sorry for the crazy long post, but lots of rides to update on!