Happy birthday Basse!

Ahh, happy birthday to my forever baby Fat Unicorn who is 15 today! 🦄💜 He's been mine since he was 4 years old and gaaaahh this has made me a little teary. I'm so blessed to have had this horse in my life for so long - we were never going to be world beaters, but who cares when you have a horse with a heart of gold!

 If you follow me on Instagram or this blog's Facebook page, you'll have seen that on Saturday I had a super ride on Basse. I was really really pleased with him, and like I stated earlier he wouldn't be so happy to be back working properly if he wasn't feeling good. So I think we will just have to crack on with the work once again and try to get him to lose those extra pounds that he has gained recently! 🐷

Following my lesson on Friday, I carried on with working hard on keeping my hands really still even though Basse wasn't feeling super light like Vallu was during the lesson - but I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of an effect it would have on him... Yes we had several moments where Basse resembled more of a giraffe than a proper dressage horse but when we both got our acts together he felt wonderful! It made me realise that now I've got my lower leg behaving better

I also paid a lot of attention to getting him truly off the leg - lots of transitions and quick reactions from him to my leg aid resulted in him doing proper working trot and canter that I din't have to chase or constantly nag him! I read somewhere last week that a well trained horse should carry on in whatever pace you have asked of him until you ask him to do something else, so with this is mind I wanted Basse to be thinking a lot more forwards than I normally let him be. If previously I've been satisfied with 60% effort from him, now it needs to be 80% and he needs to stay in trot or canter until I ask something else from him, rather than him dropping back into trot before I've wanted to.

He's such a good man, riding him is so much fun even though everything we do is just very basic and nowhere near anything advanced. (And also please do excuse the 💩 stains, I was in a rush to ride before it started to rain so I didn't have time to scrub the stains away...! 🙈 )

For anyone interested we are wearing HV Polo RAF blue set, BR silver over reach boots and my Spooks unicorn t-shirt all from Feather Dressage.