OTTB Charm

Charmer has lived at my house for about a month now, and it has been absolutely amazing. He loves living on a nearly 2 acre pasture for most of the time, and is more than happy to be ridden in our arena, or climb on the trailer for lessons and shows. I gave him nearly 3 weeks off when he first moved to our property because we were working on making the arena ready to be ridden in - pulling weeds, getting a drag, etc. Once the arena was finally done, I climbed up on my horse (which was a little comical, as we don't have a mounting block yet, so I wandered around trying to find something tall enough to use as a mounting block for the day). As we were walking around the arena, the horses in our pasture come galloping  over, and I was sure Charmer was going to have a full blown meltdown. Wrong. He lazily flicked an ear in their direction and went right back to work. Even halfway through our ride, the neighbors' horses decided to start screaming and running because ohmygosh there ...

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...

I swear at some point I will actually start blogging more than once a month (if that). What a crazy month that it has been for me though! So crazy, in fact, that I will have to write more than one post on it. To kick off the post, I got to have a really fantastic experience with my barn. They went up to Thunderbird from 6/26-7/2. I have been working at the barn for the last few months and they decided last minute to take me as a groom! I rushed to get my passport together, and make sure that I had everything I would need, and we went off to Canada! This was my first experience at an A-rated jumper show, and just WOW. The atmosphere, people and horses are all fascinating to be around. It took a couple of days for me to adjust to the environment of these shows and exactly how to keep our barn running smoothly, but everyone at the barn was helpful and patient while I got the swing of things. By day 3 I was having a blast! We brought 6 horses on the trip and there just happened...

Wow! I cannot believe it has been over a month since I last posted. This post is going to be a monster, considering I am covering a big month of happenings for Charmer and I, so buckle up! First off, I audited a Karen O'Connor clinic on April 1-2, then Charmer had several weeks of his pro training before having a fun schooling show on April 22nd with one of his trainers, and then I had my first lesson on him after his 3 weeks of pro training, and then I played with Charmer over his very first cross-country jumps!! We will start off with a brief recap of the KOC clinic. This was my first time auditing a clinic from KOC, and while I have definitely heard some brutal stories about her in clinics, everyone walked away from this clinic without any tears. Karen definitely is very up front about her opinions of you, your horse, and well, basically everything. She will tell you if you are royally screwing up, and she won't let you forget it. I ended up jump crewing for her practic...

So here is the exciting news that I eluded to in my last post! Charmer and I have moved barns. We are now boarding (for the time being) at the barn where we take lessons, and for this month, I have been able to put Charmer into pro training - which means he is going to get at least a dozen rides by our favorite trainer this month, along with a few other high level riders and trainers that work at the barn! I wish I could have said something abut this move ahead of time, but we were in a bad boarding situation and I couldn't risk our barn owner knowing about anything. To give a little background, the owner was still feeding the horses and things, but a lot of things had gone down that made the barn owner and I not get along whatsoever, and it turned into a little bit of fear for my own safety as well as my horse's. But on a happier note! This move is exactly what we needed. I was a little hesitant on how Charmer would react to moving from a large dry lot to a 12'x12...

Tonight, Charmer has a vet/chiropractor appointment. Mostly a routine "get all the things back in line" checkup, but also checking up on a few things to ease my paranoid, nervous, crazy horse mom brain. Assuming all goes well in his appointment tonight, I will have some very  exciting news coming up tomorrow. I cannot say anything until all of the i's are dotted and t's are crossed, because the situation is somewhat delicate, but suffice it to say, I am busting with excitement and nervousness about it right now. This is my face about our exciting news 😁 Also there is a new piece of tack that is gracing my plain bay horse's face. I haven't gotten the chance to ride in it, but it is a new noseband from  Uisce Saddlery . I first heard about them from  SprinklerBandits blog  and got a sudden itch to get one. I have wanted a white padded, fancy stitched noseband for Charmer for quite a while now, and that seemed like the perfect thing to order. It arri...

I am basically too tired to do a real write up on the show that we had on Saturday, but in order to sum it all up - the day started a little rocky, but once I got on and we got to work, Charmer was a superstar! We had some of our best rounds to date. We kept our brains in our skulls and we ended up being one of only a handful of horses all day that did not buck, bolt, spook or refuse at anything. Also, every pole stayed up! Charmer did not even try to take anything down. Lots of people commented that he looked really nice, and calm. So yay for a successful show and I hope you guys enjoy this photo dump. Rocking our warmup Trotting through puddles Power trot Loving the burgundy and navy look Crossrail king I love the mountains in these pictures Eating up those 2' jumps "2'3" and scary fillers? Psh, easy." Snappy knees "Oxers are no big thang" Wow look at me actually looking up! Ever so careful hind end ...