just dropping these right here

We have a dressage lesson today, then a lesson at OF tomorrow wherein I intend to keep things light and easy in preparation for Loch Moy on Sunday. Should be a good time - hopefully the weather continues to cooperate with pleasant and mild temps in the 70s!

So in the meantime, I wanted to squeeze in these pictures from last week's lesson at OF, which somehow got shuffled aside to make room for Jenny Camp posts. 

It wasn't really much to write home about - hot and sticky and buggy. Plus we again intended to keep things carefree to avoid dulling Isabel unnecessarily. She was brilliant on the flat and P concurred that the time off did good things for the mare. (recall this was P's first time seeing Izzy since the bleh lesson indoors immediately preceding the flu diagnosis).

But the jumping brought out a slightly different creature. And you could hardly call it jumping anyway - it started with a line of trot poles that Isabel clearly felt were unimpressive. She was breathing FIRE. It slowly grew to a grid, ending with three low jumps (with placing poles) set at one stride distances. A pretty common exercise in lessons with P, and Isabel was just way too sasssssssssy. 

i think we cleared the fence isabel. it's, um, it's wayyyy down there, hon.

seriously tho - you gave it plenty of room

ah yes, our favorite porpoise strikes again

yep you sure are a fancy fish

So yea... pretty much every single round went this way. Way over-jumping followed by ridiculous shenanigans on the back side. Nothing dangerous or scary... just... eh not really what I wanted the day before a show, ya know? 

Fortunately we know that Isabel usually only pulls these moves when she thinks the course is finished, so finally I just kept pointing her at jump after jump (they were all right around ~2' or lower, so not enough to wear her out) until she cantered away like a normal broke horse. 

Ugh. Mares.... Hopefully the lesson this weekend will include less fireworks! Or at least hopefully the fireworks will be limited to Memorial Day type festivities :)