how interesting.....

I'm aware of the weather and daylight starting to close down, so any riding or other horse time is increasingly precious. We had some strange weather this weekend, as if it really couldn't make its mind up what to do - but I managed to ride Fi both days.

On Saturday we took Dudley and Rosie out around the stubble fields next to us. We're not sure which fields will be ploughed for winter sowing so wanted to make the most of what we could currently ride on. They were both good and we had both trots and canters :D

As we headed back, we had talked about "schooling" while riding out, as Rosie is much more forward going when out. But when mum asked Rosie to move away from Dudley, you could see the "won't go" attitude coming back.

Ah - a moment of revelation for mum. So it is not *all* about the arena. There is more to it than that ! It is about comfort zones. Rosie has a number of them. Ask her out of one and she struggles.

When mum got a nice walk away from Dudley, I yelled to her to turn back and make a big fuss. Mum's immediate reaction was to ask for more "if she can walk, then she can...." But Rosie can't actually cope with more yet. (When mum started to ask for something more, the nice ears-forward attitude started to go and the bolshie face came back). It was enough for today just to get the attitude change to positive and get her confident enough to walk away a short distance. That is something we can build on.

(Next time we can try walking away and back more than once, for example).

Sunday was somewhat windier and there were flurries of spitting rain - not quite enough to stop riding, but with the potential to get worse (in the end they didn't. So we made the decision to stick to the arena.

Mum had commented the week before that Rosie was so much better by herself, so I had already thought we should try without Dudley there. In addition we were playing with the idea of giving mum a lumge lesson on Rosie - so it seemed like a good idea to try.

It worked quite well. Rosie was better on the right rein - mum needed to intervene and steer more on the left rein. But we got some good walk and trot walk done, using the whole arena not just staying on a 20m circle.

In walk, I got mum to think about the foot fall, thinking about when the hind leg was off the ground. Just thinking about that seemed to free both of them up. Working on keeping the knee soft then added some more, and we had a nice free walk going on :) When mum needs to use her legs (when Rosie slows), her bad back means she tends to brace her leg and lean back slightly. This seems to be blocking Rosie's movement. I suspect it makes mum's back ache as well.

I also worked with mum on her rising trot. In trot, her knee tends to float forward and then to balance she has to brace it. We worked out this is because she was tending to rise straight up - partly because Rosie was not really moving forward in the way Dudley might. By getting mum to angle slightly forward, it helped her back, and freed Rosie up some more :)

We finished off by taking off the lunge line and working around the arena, with me as if I was lunging (carrying the lunge whip). Having got decent walk and trot on both reins, including the "bad" left rein, we called it a day as Rosie had kept a good attitude pretty much through the whole session.

Let's hope (plan) this is something we can build on to take things forward. It is not that Rosie is not improving, but she is not improving as fast as I would expect given her age and the work we have been doing. Last year the long reining gave us a breakthrough. Fingers crossed lunging will give us the next one.