OTTB Charm

I'm pretty much the world's worst blogger, and I'm just owning it at this point, but I've had media from our outing with my trainer that was 3 weeks ago and didn't get around to posting it. Oops. I really intended to, but my dad, husband and I went on a week long trip right after my clinic. It was so fun, incredibly healing, and a great respite from life. Then I got back and went into full swing on my "new" job. I've off and on been working for my vet for nearly a year, but of course with all the things that had happened with my mom, I couldn't be 100% there. Now, I'm working with them more regularly and getting trained on the phone system which has been a big learning curve but an awesome experience. So anyways, blog got backburned again (big shock) but I do have some fun stuff to write about, even if its a little late.  Today's post is for my lil chestnut lady, and tomorrow we will follow up with Charm's weekend as well. Two posts in ...

I'm not sure many people followed this blog before, and I'm sure after a year+ hiatus, there is almost no one who will be reading it now. But I've always enjoyed keeping up on Instagram or blogging as my own personal diary to look back on over time anyways, and I think now is a good time to get back into it. That being said, who knows if I'll be able to keep up on it this time, but I really hope I do. Things are different in almost every possible way since I last wrote on this blog.  In early 2020, Banner was still my main mount, Charmer was just barely coming back into work, and covid was just beginning. Early that year, I lost my long time trainer and good friend when she moved back home to Oregon. I still am lucky enough to see her intermittently since then, but seeing her once every few months is definitely vastly different than weekly lessons.  An early XC school in 2021 with Charmer (Training Rolltop) I'm a little mad at myself for not blogging the last half o...

Last week, I had an opportunity to go out cross country schooling! Banner and I had a show jumping lesson earlier in the day, so I decided to bring Charmer! Its been over two years since I've brought him out, so I didn't expect much of anything for the schooling, but appreciated the opportunity to get out with him in a low pressure, mellow environment.  We arrived long before all of the others joining our group lesson, giving Charmer a fair amount of time to settle into the surroundings and let me get him all ready at my own pace. Once some of the other riders arrived, I threw Charmer on the lunge and worked on transitions and just taking in the sights at first. We moved on to roping him over a few of the smaller fences & playing in the water and popped him up and down the banks a bit! He was distracted and a touch wild but listened well for the most part and was at least jumping nicely! We got to a place where I felt like he was as focused as I could make him on the lunge ...

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...