february 21, 2022

My dad’s here for a visit and he watched our lesson today. His thoughts: “it seemed like you had control of the horse, he was more playful and seems to have a different attitude”

This is really special for me — he doesn’t know much about horses and their behavior, but this tells me Karl is clearly happy and responding to this new training style well and coming out of his shell. I don’t want to have control, but I am making my presence known and my voice heard and taken seriously.

We did arena maintenance today - Luther dragged piled up footing in the corners and entrance to the middle, I raked down the edges of the kick boards and helped Meg blow off the ledges and brush everything down. Then Meg spread magnesium chloride to prevent dust and freezing and I learned how to hook the drag up to the 4-wheeler.

Karl was very interested in all these new smells and not so much in our work. I’m working on not moving so much and staying more in the middle at liberty and using my energy to speak to him, I can be much louder. He’s parking really well at the mounting block now. We rode and he was quite tired after working the canter at liberty. It was going nicely but then he started blowing through his shoulders like he used to in the first year-ish of training. It was really interesting when he brought it back - need to just break the pattern, stick with that and release after he’s brought the shoulders in. We worked through it.