Nothing Like Jumping Right Back Into It

Why are vacations so short?  Four days in the sun relaxing, eating, and drinking is not enough! 

All you can drink margaritas are surprisingly strong, like half tequila and half sweet and sour. 

After 5 days off, McKenna and I had our first lesson with Jen tonight.  I lunged her last night, and she ran and ran making me somewhat nervous for tonight.  Tonight I turned her out and let her run herself around.  Then we went on the line with side reins for another 10 minutes before the lesson. Poor pony was tired.

We started by trotting a circle at each end then crossing the diagonal line and repeating. I tend to loose connection in my outside rein so we focused on having a good feel on both reins and pushing her into my outside rein.  Jen had me exaggerate turning my body to the inside to get McKenna to follow me and bend her body.  We got some really nice trot and Jen kept commenting how cute she looked.

Every time we changed direction, when I sat to change my diagonal, McKenna would pause and hesitate.  I've tried some sitting trot with her in the past, and she's never sure what to do.  Tonight Jen had me do 10 steps posting and 10 steps sitting.  At first McKenna would stiffen up and suck back during the sitting trot, but after a few minutes she figured it out and had the same soft trot if I was posting or sitting.  Our homework is to continue that and start adding in 10 steps of two point.

In our canter work we went back to exaggerating turning my body and scooping her up with my inside leg and rein.  We kept her on a circle, letting her figure out the bend.  She wasn't too sure what to do with the added inside leg at first but started to get it towards the end.  Surprisingly she's gotten a lot better to the right.  Our problem going right was that she wanted to over bend and drift out on one side of the circle.  I had to relax my inside leg a bit to catch her with my outside leg.  She got a little worked up, and had a mini buck about it, but settled down and got over it.   We quit with that, since it was obvious we were close to baby's mental limit. 

I am so happy that even with time off McKenna can come back and work really well.  I'm hoping to have another lesson in two week and maybe, if we work on our homework, we can start doing some trot and canter poles. 

Tired baby is tired