Happy Holidays!!!

Merry Christmas ! Unluckily, the snow missed christmas by just a few days, but I've got a picture of Olivia in a light white covering from last week.



Today was the first day I played with Olivia since before Christmas Eve. She wasn't keen on the idea of coming out of the field, but I made sure that when she wasn't with me she was getting some exercise and it certainly didn't take long for her to come running straight to me, and then she really did not want to leave! So we played a bit with the question box online to prepare for a nice riding session. I've been working on my bareback riding for a while now for two reasons - 1. my independant seat bareback is light years behind my seat in a saddle especially in canter 2. I've been too lazy to lug my saddle around :)

Anyway, we played question box and bullseye at walk/trot and it was nice. Then we started cantering, which I'm unsure about. I know that I tense up a lot more in the canter and thats probably the reason for her being silly. She tends to toss her head about a lot and she does short, snappy strides and stops, and does little bucks and jumps normally. Because her canter is lovely under saddle, I can only assume she does this because she feels the tension in my body. So she was giving me the same today, and we just kept going through it. And then, she did the LOVLIEST rear ever! I say lovely because it would have made a beautiful photo, she was veery left brain about it and I wish my Dad had caught it on camera. Unfortunately, I hadn't asked her to do that. But after the rear everything just fell into place. She did lovely canters to both sides, and I felt totally at ease. I really wanted to keep on going with that canter, but I heard Linda Parelli's voice in my head: 'ride for tomorrow', and so I left it at that and cannot wait to see how she goes tomorrow.

Hope everyones had a fantastic christmas! Can't wait for the new year and what it will bring

Polite, Passive, Pesistance

I started this post last week, so its a week out of date, sorry!

I think that is the main lesson I learnt today in my lesson with Terri Martinus. And along with that line, is a story she told me. When she was in the Florida centre, she was lucky enough to have a talk from a top trainer from one of the water world parks. Now this lady had trained dolphins, whales and other trainers, and one whale she trained was named Shamu. Now just the week before, Shamu had put another of his trainers into hospital. One of the students on the course asked why/how this trainer had ended up in hospital, and the lady said 'we tell or whales/dolphins to send like this (much like the way we send our horses), but this trainer made the movement twice with his finer, and Shamu was such a dominant whale he was having none of it and just went at him'.

Ok, so obviously Olivia is NOT that extreme, but she is like that! She is so very very sensitive but also needs to be TOLD you ARE going to do this.

We went right back to basics today, and spent most the lesson refining the first 3 games. We started to get really picky about what I was asking, and rather than boring her to death, this actually caught her interest. I've never seen my horse yawn so much!