wednesday wins

Happy midweek, y'all! It's been a bit quiet around here for horse things, since I'm catching up with other life stuff that got missed while I was down with ye olde 'rona virus recently, womp haha... 

barnyard perspectives with the red mare

But "quiet" doesn't mean non-existent, fortunately! Y'all might remember the somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also kinda serious post I wrote about Doozy flunking her '30 day performance review.'

The gist was basically that... We're really going to need to see this horse be rideable from a soundness perspective sooner rather than later, and I put some specific numbers and metrics around what that'll mean to me by the time we get to around the 90 day milestone. 

oooooh barn hacks with a babysitter too!

And ya know. It takes two to tango, right? If for whatever reason, we get to 90 days and Doozy hasn't cleared those benchmarks... Well, it should NOT be for lack of trying on my part. 

So... sure, Doozy's foot is still sore from her recent giant abscess. But we can get a little creative in carefully and gently logging new and important adventures and experiences all the same, right?

the littlest loop that somehow still manages to check off a lot of good "hacking" boxes!
landmarks, ridden counter clockwise: sheep top right corner, stream bottom left corner

Like recently, when we "hacked out" under the careful supervision of a junior who volunteered to hand walk her horse around with us to 'baby sit.' 

Does Doozy need a baby sitter? Maybe not. Does she like it tho? Yep, she does. Is it nicer to log happy relaxed experiences right now? Yep, it is. 

artsy?? or just too sheepish to ask for a pic? you decide!

It's especially nice when we get to that little stream crossing at the bottom of the wooded section heading back to the barn (bottom left corner of the above map). Doozy has crossed the stream in hand with water in it, and has crossed the section under saddle when it was dried up (is a very small stream branch).

But she'd never successfully crossed it under saddle while water flowed through. Until, that is, this ride!! Good girl!!

just #sheepish things

And ya know, context, situation, circumstances... They all work together, right? I'd hand walked her over it with legit zero issues the day before -- after having not seen it at all for a few weeks. And now we had a nice calm horse leading the way. 

did i mention that it rained a bit during our recent starter trials -- great way to get all the little streams and such flowing again!

Doozy definitely wanted to go back to the barn, and understood that the shortest way home was over the little stream. And ya know, we were patient and let her sniff it out and think through her steps. And, ta da!, she did a little hop over it. Whaddagooodguurrrl!!!

omg look at these cute custom coasters created by one of our barn workers!

It was a really nice experience bc, from her perspective, a lot of nice things happened after she crossed the stream: 

First, obvi, going home, yay, her favorite! But second, she got a shit ton of praise for it, which she wasn't necessarily expecting. But definitely seemed to like. 

legit the actual cutest, i love them! will also *never* be used as coasters bc... too cute haha

That's the cool thing about her personality, too --- she seems really highly connective, highly sociable. Remember in the video I took when we first met her, when she both wanted to connect with the dog running around outside the round pen... but also wanted to join up with the handler conducting the round pen work. 

resident barnyard panther Icee took a mouse into Charlie's stall for a little light murder/torture

My hope is that if I can help her connect the dots between the work I'm asking her to do, and that really nice praise and reward, she'll have a big breakthrough about like... everything haha. 

But ya know. The whole 'sore foot' situation kinda works against me simultaneously --- if she instead connects anything we do with, 'wow that sucked bc my foot hurt!' then, ya know, that just makes everything harder. So as always, it's a balancing act. 

lol and then there are my fat house cats haha.... 

We have options, tho, right? I had thought to maybe keep the horse barefoot behind over the winter, if possible. But not at the expense of being able to cope with all the rocky pathways and driveways etc. So we'll see. 

In the meantime, we'll take the wins where we get them! Hope y'all are having a nice week too ;)