the 'boring' stuff

Obviously having a great clinic ride with Doozy was the blockbuster news from this past weekend. But as promised -- there was a fair amount of nitty gritty 'boring' preparation that went into helping Doozy be prepared and successful for Sunday's lesson.

cold wet horses on a cold wet day -- see dooz hiding behind stella?

And obviously the urge to document is pretty strong around these parts (lol), so here's a rundown of what Doozy did on Friday and Saturday. 

Bc basically... I was honestly really really not confident that we'd be able to do the clinic. Like, it felt like a crapshoot right up to the moment we were literally at the gates waiting to go in. 

pretty excited to learn how to keep developing this fancy prance!

Doozy had three days off from Tuesday to Thursday bc I had to travel for work, and then was feeling a little cold + wet on Friday -- when the weather ended up being a bit more miserable than predicted and all the poor ponies were nekid in the nastiness :(

in the meantime, i like letting ground poles do the work for me!

At least this meant she was pretty willing to leave her pasture and come in to the warm dry barn! Which, I'm happy to say, is a skill she's normalizing even if it's still a work in progress. 

wheeeee canter poles!!

We were able to ride up to the indoor as a nice group of three horses, all of whom were happy to just do low key rides and be nice company for Doozy. Tho, the ride got off to kinda a bad start when for some reason all the horses spooked at a barrel jump set up by the door. 

and the other lead too!!

I don't know exactly what the issue was, but the light was kinda weird (overcast and rainy outside, with one LED light like directly over the barrels illuminating them strangely) and Doozy definitely felt a certain sort of way about it. I finally opted to just hop off and move them, at which point Doozy just like... realized they were just the same barrels as always, and ceased to care. 

operation 'traffic skool' = mission accomplished

And from there, the ride just went back to being the same exact type of ride we've been having: really pleasant trotting of figures and ground poles, including a new pattern of proper trot poles that Doozy figured out easily. We also cantered around a bit, including some nice efforts off both leads over single ground poles. 

fun little video of her schooling session

Also notable: Doozy was able to cope with trotting among multiple trotting horses, experienced having a 4th horse join us while we were mid-ride, and existed in the center of the ring while two horses cantered around her. 

learning to appreciate the pets <3

It's possible that I overthink the details (as was gently suggested by one of the juniors in our group haha), and it's possible that Doozy would have been just as successful in the lesson even if I were less intentional... But, eh, to me - the absence of any big issue is validation enough.

lol hard to tell but we're hand walking in the jump ring!! 

Anyway, being the overthinker that I am, I kinda tortured myself about taking advantage of our 3 quiet baby-sitters to get out to the jump ring. On one hand, it felt like a crucial step if we had any chance of doing the clinic... But otoh, Doozy's uncharacteristic spook at the barrels, plus the cold+wet+fussy+hadn't-been-ridden-in-3-days bit put me off slightly.

and then a nice little walk down the back paths to get home again

But luckily my friends won out, again telling me to maybe "under think" it, and so I dismounted and walked out with the group. There was a lesson underway with 5 or 6 horses who were trotting and cantering while we wandered around (with Doozy's nose firmly behind our pal Rosette's tail haha). And it was a bit much, but Doozy kept it together shockingly well.

the baby-sitters club <3

She had one little moment when we were heading in the direction of the gate where she wanted to jump around and flag her tail... But then was quickly redirected to sniffing through jump cups and poles and standards. She definitely seems to be a horse that appreciates physical landmarks vs vast openness! 

So I took it as a good sign that she could disengage from her gate feelings and interact with her surroundings. We left the ring quietly after about two laps (one in each direction), and made it home without incident. Yay!

don't worry, charlie got attention too!!!

The next day, Saturday, was super simple. My parents visited, and while Charlie came down to see them in the barn, we left Doozy out to visit on her turf. Walked out to the field to snuggle and stuff her with muffins, then left her there. She's never been hard to catch (actually usually walks up to me), but I still saw this as a nice little 'coin in the piggy bank' moment. 

he's obsessed with my mother

After my parents left, I went and grabbed Doozy for real. She came in decently well, but now with fewer leaves on the trees we can still hear Stella's hollering all the way up in the barn. So she was a bit agitated on the cross ties. But I just took my time anyway. Figuring, "this is kinda the test," ya know? Like, come in, be not-super-happy about it. But #cope.

doozy got hand delivered muffins and snuggles too!!

Then for the ride itself, we went out on our first solo adventure in a while. Just a tiny little loop around the farm -- mimicking what we'd done the day before. Up the driveway (where we encountered 3-4 lesson horses being led past us down another lane - something that, again, Doozy didn't love, but #coped anyway), toward the indoor, but then past it, down the lane toward the jump ring, but then turned left toward home instead of right toward the ring. 

pink star = Doozy's pasture; blue star = the barn; heart = indoor ring; yellow star = jump ring
orange lines = our little circuit, ridden counter clockwise

I admit to kinda wimping out on riding up to the jump ring. Mostly bc... I figured if we had a bolting episode, it'd just make it harder for us the next day in the clinic. It was enough that she'd seen the ring in hand on Friday, and then was able to ride (alone!) around the same paths to the ring on Saturday. I figured we'd be fine for Sunday, when we wouldn't be alone. And we were!

my sweet ponies <3

So ya know. Maybe it sounds boring to just do like an 8min circuit around the farm lanes and paths. But, eh, it was nice to do something sorta easy after the challenge of leaving her possessive pasture mates, and then be able to return her fairly promptly back to them feeling like she maybe accomplished something in the meantime. 

Or maybe I'm overthinking it LOL! So far, so good tho haha.