OTTB Charm

It's been a busy last couple of months in the circus my life. The boys and I have gotten into a routine again - a solid 4+ rides per week schedule for both of them. And I finally dragged our sorry butts out to lessons. Wonder has had two lessons, one with each one of our trainers. He won them both over with his brave, cute little movement and good brain. I was a little rusty, and suffering from "rogue left hand syndrome" at first, but I'm getting back to the rhythm of things. Charmer and I had a lesson with S and she changed some of our tack and absolutely revolutionized  our ride. We got back to jumping 2'6"/2'9" comfortably with her help. Good trainers are life changing! The week after all of our lessons, I put all of our training to use at home. Wonder is learning to accept and seek the contact while staying forward on the flat. In the moments where he gets it, I get a fantastic glimpse into the horse he will become in time! I worked with Cha...

If that isn't the cutest photo you've ever seen, then you are lying. This is a picture of Charmer packing around an adorable little 2 year old girl. What you can't see in this photo is the giant smile on her face (and mine). This last weekend, I invited a few families from my church over to the house for dinner, and I expanded it to be an evening with "pony" rides for the kids. Charmer had almost 2 weeks off prior to this (stupid busy schedule!), and all I had the chance to do that afternoon was a quick 10 minute lunge session. He came out great for the lunge, and was super respectful and stretchy on the line. Since he was being so good and my schedule was jam packed, I threw him back out in the pasture. Fast forward to about 3 hours later, the families began to arrive and so I pulled out Charmer & his tack and gave him a quick brush and tacked him up super fast. He was great for that. I then pulled out a bunch of small carrot chunks that I had chopped...

Those freshly groomed arena feels 😍😍😍

Yesterday, I had the day off (finally!), and it was the perfect time to get some routine maintenance done on Charmer. His hind shoes were coming up on 9 weeks and needing reset, so Farrier came out at 9:00, and we kicked off the day right, with a new set of hind shoes (his fronts & hinds are on different schedules right now). Once he was done, he got to go back out in the pasture and goof off with his friends for a few hours. Around noon, I went out and hooked up the trailer - which was pretty comical, because I could not get the ball flipped up in the bed of the truck. It took me like 10 minutes. When I actually got it flipped right side up, it took me less than 5 minutes to get the trailer hooked up, but man it was pretty ridiculous getting that stupid ball flipped around. Anyways, so once everything was finally all hooked up, I went to grab Charmer, and he looked at me all "again? really lady?". At least he plays along with adventures (also why does his BoT shee...

So as I said, there would be continuation from my last post, regarding all of the life experiences that I've had recently. Thunderbird was awesome, and the clinic was even more so, but both pale in comparison to this. I bought a house! Now when I say that, I had immense amounts of help from my family and could not have done it without them. But my name is officially on this house and I am the primary homeowner. This also means that the mortgage shows up on my bank account and makes me die a little bit inside every time I look at it, but I could not be happier with this house! Overhead shot of the property The house is approximately 1,700 square feet, and it sits on 3.5 acres of land. As you can see in the picture, about half of the acreage is just pasture, then there is a dry lot with shelter and an automatic waterer, a hay barn, and there is an arena out back which is approximately 120ft x 200ft. Which is seriously a bigger arena than I've had in some boarding...