OTTB Charm

I'm making an effort to be a better, more consistent blogger this year, so here's my first post of 2020 to try and get off to a good start! First off! I bought a dressage saddle! It's a 17.5" (although rides more like a 17" IMO) Devoucoux Makila! I snagged it off of a local friend for a great deal a few weeks ago! Not that I was necessarily looking for a dressage saddle at the time, but I saw her post and the saddle was about as perfect as I could ask for in a used saddle, plus this particular one was local so I could try it on! It pretty much fits B like a glove which is great! Since his jump saddle is a Devoucoux I had a good feeling about it going in and I wasn't disappointed! The seat feels a touch tight for me but a lot of that I attribute to not being in dressage tack for so long. I rode in it for the trial, and while I felt a bit out of place, I knew it would work for us! A few days later, I did our first at home ride in the saddle! ...

Over the last few weeks, I've been trying really hard with Banner to stay on a semi-consistent schedule. The minimal daylight hours right now do not  help with our situation, so keeping the same kind of schedule we were on in the summer is just not possible, but managing 3-4 rides a week is generally doable for me. Our #1 goal right now is straightness - and honestly its more for me than him right now! Working on our bigger trot at home About 6 weeks ago, I fell off in a lesson. Pretty insignificant fall for the most part, but it highlighted some issues that I am having with my own body & magnified them. Banner has always been a crooked horse, and somewhere over this last year I became a pretty crooked rider too. And unfortunately we became crooked the same way! I've put a fairly significant amount of money into Banner to keep him in line, but I have neglected that same care for myself (I'm sure all of you can relate!). I used to be really good about chiropract...

Banner and I are gearing up for our last local HT of the year! If I'm being totally honest, I was 100% going to wimp out on doing the dressage/XC part of this show, and just do the show jumping. Since B was so tightly wound at our last outing, I felt like we needed some more schooling in order to make XC a positive experience for us. But Trainer sent me a text a few days after our last lesson and asked if I wanted to go cross country for our next lesson instead of another show jumping lesson (I had told her my thoughts on likely not doing cross country at this show), and I thought about it for a moment before deciding why not! I'd like to end the year on a more positive note than our last experience was (tense dressage, wild XC, lost shoe in SJ). In order to make for a (hopefully) nice, civil outing tomorrow, I have been doing lots of schooling rides at home this week focusing on brakes and reminding him he has a brain and he has to use it! He has been checking in really w...

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 ...

Okay, first off, I must preface this by saying that I am officially the worst  blogger & this show happened nearly 2 weeks ago and I am just now blogging about it. Whoops. Oh well, better late than never, right? So we went ahead and decided to enter Novice again at our local little schooling show! We are consistently schooling around that height in our lessons and its feeling better and better, I just need to keep learning how to make better decisions! Because its a smaller schooling show, we ran some of the divisions out of order, so I did SJ first, and then Dressage later in the morning. I'm sure for some people in my group that made a big difference (either good or bad), but with Banner it really makes no difference for us. Since Novice is technically 2'11" max, they put us in the 2'9" group instead of 3' just to keep it under max height. 2'9" is the first class of the day that they run (mostly so the people jumping the bigger ju...

This weekend Banner & I participated in another one of our local schooling shows! We decided to enter the Novice HT round + a couple of 3'0" show jump rounds. Saturday morning bright and early, we pulled out of our driveway (sometime around 6:30am?) and headed off to the show. Our ride time for dressage was around 7:45am, so I managed to get tacked up & on him by 7:10am. We got some good warmup time in the nice arena which is technically the jump ring warmup, but the footing is better there, so I wanted to spend more time there than in the dressage area. We headed over to dressage at 7:30 and of course we were already a couple of minutes behind schedule, but it kicked off pretty well after that. I forgot to fly spray his ears and there were a lot of gnats, so I lost some focus once we got over to the dressage arena unfortunately, but Banner was still mostly a good boy. I forgot how stupid deep the footing is in that dressage arena and so I decided to just...