So every 3 or 4 mouthfuls of dinner, Dino has to go to his window and lick his salt lick and then have a mouthful of water. One side effect of this routine is that speedibeet gets kinda everywhere*, including the outside of the window sill…a fact little Harry next door is learning to make the most of! There’s always a very cleanly licked portion of the windowsill where Harry can reach.

*especially in his water feeder! He has an automatic one as the useless yard people have been known to not fill water buckets sufficiently but this does mean I spend a certain amount of time each weekend cleaning bloody sugarbeet out of the damned thing. It’s kinda gross.

We don’t do mornings any more it seems!

Can’t say I blame him though, was p*ssing it down and freezing cold – talking about snow tomorrow! 😮 We also did a bit of loading practice today and he was super good (he will load, he’s just suspicious of trailers, so every time my friend has her trailer out we have a walk through it. Only needed a tiny bit of encouragement from behind to talk on today :db:).

The reason the trailer was out was my friend’s horse, Tally, decided on Saturday that he really wasn’t getting on the trailer, reared, and went bombing off out of the yard and down the bridlepath :o. They managed to get him on a bit later that afternoon but she’s been keeping up the practice this week make it ‘stick’. So after I’ve practised with Dino and stuck him in the field we get Tally out. He walks on just fine, twice. Brilliant! Now, he’s small so he needs go onto the left side of a trailer so as we’ve been successful getting on the very open right side, I switch all the bits round and Claire asks him walk on the left side just to make sure it’s ok that way too. He gets on the trailer and at that very instant a hailstorm appears out of nowhere. 😮 My lord. Hail is noisy on a trailer roof! Tally is not best pleased about this and gets rather upset at this point so it would have been quite dangerous to try and get him off the trailer until he calmed so we sit there for 10 mins waiting for it to stop. Long 10 mins I can tell you…. It stopped, he came off nicely and went straight back on again *phew* so all’s well that ends well but talk about unlucky timing!!

We had such a good lesson today! So proud of him :wub: My instructor said he was stepping through really well and his back is much freer. We’ve been working on transitions, as ever, but we’ve been putting in lots of walk to canter, as well as trot to canter, along with the walk & trot work and he’s really getting stronger and fitter as well as working better. He was superb today! Really feel like we’re getting somewhere. :yahoo:

In super brave news I’ve booked myself on a ‘clinic & compete’ at the yard where my instructor works. It’s a fairly low stress way of getting into the competition thing; there’ll be three people doing intro B on 18 April when I’m going, we get a brief clinic on how to ride the test and then do a mini competition. Everyone gets a rosette, no need to dress up, and my instructor is teaching so it won’t be with a stranger. So that’s it; committed now! Proper competitions after that. 😮

I wish I’d had my phone or camera with me today! Ponies have been stuck in this week because the yard are paranoid about them going out when it’s icy. Given this, and his aversion to mornings, I thought I’d loose school today and do fun jumping things with him. So we get to the school and I shut the door and he forgets that the stage between ‘Mummy shuts the door’ and ‘Dino gets to gallop about the place’ is ‘Mummy takes his headcollar off’ so he leaps forwards, panics as he gets stuck, I nearly get my arm pulled out of its socket and we all land up about 4 feet further forward than we were and a bit confused. He’s all like 😮 and then ‘Ohhhhh headcollar. Yeah. Right. Sorry, forgot’. So I take it off and he goes FLYING round the school – bucking, rearing, has a good roll, then more galloping, bucking, farting. He had a grand old time. Would have made excellent video. :wub:

When I thought he’s calmed down I put five trotting poles out (we are under physios instructions to do more trotting poles) and he takes one look at them, gallops at them flat out, jumps the first three and then can’t work out where to put his feet so lands on the second two before galloping to the other end of the school and standing around looking very smug. No, Dino, that’s not how that works. Try again? Well ok then! This time he jumps four. :rolleyes: He did calm down after that and do them nicely, very nicely, and then we raised them a bit and did some like that and then we did some proper jumps which is very much enjoyed. :db:

Things we have learned this week: he’s not really an early bird…

Monday – rode in the evening, beautifully forward and working really well
Wednesday – rode first thing, didn’t want to go anywhere, even with a jump up, took him out for a hack instead and he didn’t really want to do that either!
Thursday – rode in the evening when it was blowing a gale, beautifully forward if a little perplexed by the wind

Proper cold in London now – predicting snow even for us over the weekend!

Just as the rest of you come back I’ve missed posting for a bit! :laugh:

Dino is going great right now (well, except when he isn’t). We’ve been trying not to do too much in the school as he doesn’t like it and my instructor has declared he needs to get a bit fitter so there’s been a fair amount of hacking with friends from around the yard. We’ve been up to the local open space, round the roads, and anywhere else we can get from the yard on foot really and it seemed to have cheered him up no end. In the school we’ve been working on trot-canter transitions, walk-canter transitions and some polework – both trot and canter. He’s beginning to get more consistently forward and lots and lots of transitions is helping improve the quality of his paces. He found a really swinging trot last night and a week ago Monday in the school which felt lovely! So we’re keeping it varied and fun for him. Beginning to work over some small jumps a bit better too, although I think the improvement there is more me remembering how to ride a horse over jumps and not ended up unbalancing him than anything else. I should try and borrow a horse that can actually jump and get my eye in a bit.

I have been coerced into promising my instructor I’ll take him to some shows this summer – probably intro dressage, but maybe some in hand or actual showing classes and if we can get him jumping consistently maybe some clear round jumping. I’ve not competed in a horse show of any type in 20 years 😮

Just before new year I wrote a brief Dino update for Jayne at Grays PRE who bred him which some of you might be interested to see. It’s here: http://silkyraven.livejournal.com/417309.html Really interesting to think about 2014 as a whole; he’s progressed a lot! We didn’t even have canter in the school at the start of the year.

Anyway, I know you like your photos ladies and I took some new ones for Jayne so here you go:

It’s a bit hard to see through his lovely beard but I think that lump is much smaller! [My instructor was after me to cut off his beard. She said she’s never seen me looked so shocked at a suggestion!]

Pretty face :wub: