The Terrible Fives: Baby Draft Mare Style

So last year I get this absolutely fantastic baby horse who is the champion of all things baby horse. She's calm and honest and straightforward and adorable and sweet and fun and brave and yeah basically I think she's perfect.

can you even? you cannot.

But anytime I said, "she's four" to other people, I straight up got the JUST YOU WAIT FOR THE TERRIBLE FIVES.

Which like. 1) Whether or not I'm having fun with my horse does not impact the amount of fun you can have with yours, so chill TF out about that. It's not like there's a finite fun pile and my heaping portion is taking away from yours. 2) While horses certainly start to push boundaries once they understand them, the whole point of ZB is that she's not evil or fried, so while yes, some resistance is expected, it's not like she's going to turn into some horrific hellion harpie.

well i mean. this aside lol. 

Now my baby mare is the dreaded five. She's been in training for a while and she's starting to really understand what we're asking her and where the boundaries are.

I've gotten a couple texts from trainer lately indicating that ZB has been less than 100% foot perfect. Which is still like 95% foot perfect, which I think is pretty damn good.

But hey. After spending most of a week out of state, it was time to hop on and reassess what was going on.


If you're not a video watcher (like me!), here's the relevant stills:

R LOOK AT CHAMPION BABY MARE

Her good moments were really super. 

R SHOW MOM HOW ZB R CANTER CHAMPION

Yup. 

She was cracking me up. She juuuuust figured out how to put the pieces together in terms of canter being an expected behavior under saddle so now she's like "HOKAY MOM I R CANTER LIKE GOOD BABY" and then after 1-4 strides she's like "R BERRY TIRED PLZ TO STOP NAOW HOKAY". 

But like. Constantly. Before I snagged this video, I couldn't get ten strides of trot without popping into the canter. Also #babyhorseproblems, we can't really canter and steer yet. 

R NEED COOKIES NAOW

I mean, when your baby mare "acting out" is just her being proud of herself for learning something hard? 

That's basically the cutest thing ever. 

Oh and this is what her good moments look like right now:

omfg baby mare champion

I was going to write a sarcastic comment here about "too bad she's not more fancy", but again after almost a week out of town, I came home and got on my baby mare with zero prep and had a super excellent ride and yeah... ZB is the best. I adore her. That is all.