OTTB Charm

Back in July, my husband and I picked up a dog! A super cute 4 month old GSD. He was supposed to get picked up by a family who ended up not being able to come pick him up, so he sat around while his breeders planned to market him (but didn't really, which worked out for us). Husband fell head over heels for this dog before we even met him. I kept a more level head until I met him and then promptly fell hard for him! Meet Radar! He was definitely underweight when we first got him (he was in a home with 5 other dogs and I think was getting pushed out of his food), but we have definitely fixed that. He went from about 25lbs when we first bought him to over 50lbs now! I have only ever owned little dogs during my lifetime, and the last 2 were Dachshunds at that (they both live with my parents). If you've never met a Dachshund, let me just tell you - they are stubborn little suckers. LOVE my little dogs, but their obedience is always contingent on whether or not they  fee...

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 ...

Heading into day 2, Banner & I were sitting in 1st place! But to be honest, I had no expectation of keeping that placing or anything, and I was not worried about the placing we got at this show. Right now at Novice, XC is sort of our weakest phase. Banner eats up the galloping fences (rolltops, tables, steeplechase, etc.), but some of the tougher questions (1/2 coffins, trakehners, etc.) still back him off a bit at this height. Unfortunately for the barn that puts on these shows, their tractor broke, which didn't allow them to move any of the XC fences, so our cross country course was the same as it was in July . Part of me thought "whomp whomp..." because this didn't mean really any new lines or new challenges (they did add one up bank out of water, but that was it). But then I thought about it and actually this was perfect! I knew the mistakes I made last time and we had done some XC schools to improve our weird ditch issue. The course being exactly the s...

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...

Now on to the super fun stuff from the weekend - CROSS COUNTRY!!!  Our ride time again was crazy early but I was kind of happy to beat the heat (I think it hit like 97* or something on Sunday afternoon). I had to be ready to leave the start box at 7:45am. Based on our last few outings I wasn't 100% sure how that was going to work for us. I've been re-evaluating our warmup, as Banner has gotten infinitely more fit than he was last year.  B jumping the heck out of this Novice table! I decided to leave my house around 6:20, which got me at the facility around 6:40am. I was the first one on property, but that worked out totally fine for me (good parking spot!). I let Banner marinate in his new Back on Track sheet for a bit while I brushed off his legs & booted him. Then I started on the process of putting in studs. I retapped his stud holes the night before so it would be easier, but it still took me a good 15 minutes I'm pretty sure! Once we got studded, I...