OTTB Charm

At the end of my last post , we left off with Banner having ripped off his shoe, and while it is now back on, we definitely could not do our lesson on Tuesday. Originally, I was planning to just cancel that lesson, since B was clearly out of commission. But with my work schedule preventing my lesson last week, and ponies need dentals next week, so cancelling this lesson would have put me out for 3 weeks. Not the end of the world, but I also was a bit sad about missing lessons for that long. I wavered back and forth for a while on Sunday night about whether or not to cancel, and finally decided, what the heck, lets do the lesson & I'll bring Charmer! So I texted Trainer C, letting her know I would actually come, and that I was bringing Charms. He has been in off and on work for a little while, but my schedule has not been super flexible to keeping him in a program. And honestly, I tend to ride him better when I actually have a lesson or two with someone on the ground yelling a...

Sunday morning brought show jumping day! We arrived nice & early so I could give him a long warmup if he still was a bit spicy. We got tacked up quickly and wandered over to the warmup. Only 2 other people were in there, so it was pretty quiet! Banner was forward and happy to play! Not the slightly insane forward we had the day before, but a lovely, quiet forward that was so fun to ride and we got some fantastic warmup jumps with great distances! I decided to quit while it all felt awesome, so I headed over to the main ring and went over my course a few more times. It was a nice, loopy course that gave us a good amount of challenge without being too crazy. We ended up going 3rd (I wanted to watch a couple other people go around just to be able to watch the course and learn it a bit more). I gave myself a mini pep talk "do NOT micromanage him, just let him do his job!". We picked up a lovely canter and headed to the first fence, and I stuck to my plan. Square turn...

This weekend brought around another one of our local schooling shows! I entered Banner in at Novice again, as he definitely needs more & more practice doing that level. He is laughably bored at BN, but still just a bit intimidated by some of the Novice questions, so its a great learning experience for him each time we get out. In our recent show jumping lessons with Trainer C, we have finally unlocked a new level with Banner. He is finally feeling confident & schooled enough at the 3' level that I need to stop "helping" him as much (okay, lets be real, I need to stop micromanaging him). It is super  hard for me to learn to just almost sit there in a supportive role for him. I do my part, trying to set him up well & give him a fair chance to make a good decision, but now I need to let him take some of the responsibility. Banner is loving this new balance we have struck. When I finally stopped fidgeting with him as much, you could almost hear him sigh ...