Where We're At

the scary corner

How do I say this without sounding really annoying? I'm a total vortex of stress and angst and I apologize for how annoying I must be to chat with right now.

However.

Courage and I have been re-exploring the things we enjoy doing together to see if our differences can be resolved.

We started with hacking.

I gave him the option of going forward on a loose rein at the walk, standing to looking at scary things, or getting booted around in tiny circles.

After a somewhat protracted discussion, he reliably chose option A.

+10 for lunging over a skinny and getting a pic

Then the next day, I set up jumps. I know we're not ready to tackle a course cold right now. I set a bunch of skinnies, so the whole exercise would be about steering and listening instead of the jumping so much. (One thing: I didn't have the teeniest twinge of fear at any point. Yay Courage!)

I did lunge him over the "scary" new yellow box first just so I wouldn't have to do the green horse thing from the saddle, but he was pretty great.

He was a little sketchy to ride just because while he'd jump fine, he wanted to have an absolute MELTDOWN any time I lightly touched his face in the corners (mean, mean scary happy mouth mullen OMG).

so skinny

But hey, he was turning right reliably and we even cantered a couple of the fences and you have to admit, two jump blocks is actually pretty narrow and he NEVER once questioned going over them when I was in the saddle.

That actually felt really good.

It wasn't "fun", but it was challenging and sort of fulfilling.

Well at least, it was if you ignore the part about how he started the ride by going "AIN'T NO WAY BITCHES" and rearing and spinning because omg, a quail on the ground.

so cute

So whatever all that adds up too. We were supposed to hit a little schooling show yesterday, so I lunged the snot out of him, had a fantastic dressage ride (srsly where did good horse come from???), then hacked around. He wanted to have a meltdown about something I will grant could be legitimately scary, then got over himself (with a lot of kicking from me) and was actually quite reasonable.

But then we weren't able to go to the show for reasons completely outside of our control.

position is not too terrible for barely ever jumping lately

I'm getting really good at memorizing tests I'm not going to ride, I guess.

So that's where things stand right now. I don't know where it is. But I'm here.