A little bit of this and a little bit of that

How are we doing, I hear you ask? Well not too bad actually! We had another fantastic hacking out session on Thursday, even though the weather was horribly windy and rainy. We even changed the route near the end, and had a few hairy situations, but all in all we had a good time. Hopefully this will carry on over the winter, so that next spring we can start being all brave and trotting without safety reins ;)

And since the weather has been rather appalling for a while now, the fields are just so incredibly water logged so Vallu has been going out twice a day to the pen which has somehow managed to stay in slightly better condition. He also gets to go on the walker twice a day when there is no turn out, so it's not like he is bored or stuck in his stable all day. Fingers crossed for a few days of no rain, sunshine and wind so that the fields could dry up a little bit!

And we might have had a small breakthrough on Friday... Ever since the last AF lesson, Vallu has felt a bit stiff and a bit cranky/grumpy/bored when riding. When lunging and hacking out, he is more than happy and very excitable so it feels like he just isn't that into training. For nearly the last two weeks he's had two days off, two days of hacking out, three days of lunging and only five proper riding sessions dispersed between the other things, so that he wouldn't get more than two days of riding one after another. Whatever stiffness and grumpiness he's been dealing with (maybe he's just not been feeling it? Suffering from SAD? Or just feeling blerghy? Saddle pinching him?) seems to be slowly going away. After this mini holiday last weekend, he's been ridden Monday and Tuesday, lunged Wednesday, hacked out Thursday and ridden Friday, and lunged again on Saturday. On Friday he felt very impressed with himself and was full of it in the indoor, and today during lunging we got the normal galloping around like a lunatic and refusing to stop cantering cos we're just so excited... So maybe I've been a bit blind to him getting more and more bored with work? As well bringing in a varied work schedule, I've made the decision to start doing more pole work when we get to go in the indoor so that hopefully working in the indoor won't be such a tiresome thing for him!

Favourite picture of the month ♥︎

Such a clever horse... Managed to get his headcollar over both his ears...