Catching up

It's been a while since I logged anything on this blog, but not because I haven't done anything, but because I've been too lazy to log it.

Indy has been coming along great. I haven't done much else besides sit on her and get her to move off my leg and turn and back up. I've done lots more ground work with her - working on the driving game and circling game. She's pretty good at yoyo now and with the porcupine game. But she was having trouble with yielding her hindquarters on her left side, so we worked on the driving game. When I asked her to yield on her left, she'd go forward rather than yield. She did great on her left, but it took some time before she'd yield on her left. But we made it. Will see the next time I work with her if it sticks.

We've worked quite a bit on the circling game because she tends to only move a few steps at a time before stopping. I probably played the circle game for 30-40 minutes before I could get 2 complete cirlces (let alone 4!) without her stopping before I asked her to stop. For the longest time, she'd stop as soon as I stopped asking. She couldn't quite figure out that if she kept going I'd leave her alone! But I'm hoping she'll catch on a bit quicker next time.

Skittles is now back at Ken's (the trainer's). Ken did a fair bit of ground work to see where her head is at since the last time he saw her, such as yielding and then leading from a rope around her foot. I've worked on this a fair bit with her, so she did quite well with this. Then he put the saddle on her. Once he got her moving, she bucked a bit, but settled quite quickly (from my perspective anyway). Since I've had the bareback pad on her several times with the girth done up, this was only slightly more scary with the additional weight and the stirrups hanging from it. After a while, she barely acknowledged it except to look back and sniff it once in a while (good sign -- shows she's more curious than scared!). The last thing Ken did was sit on her - he got on her from the fence, rather than mount up. He mostly just wanted to make sure she didn't object to having his leg swing over her, rub her side, bump her back etc. etc. He also threw the lariat out in front of her and dragged it back to see how she'd react to having it coiled up above her. She stood fairly quietly. She watched it with her head high, but didn't adversely react in any way. I expect he'll be riding her next session and the rest of the month will be building from there. She's been doing really well. I'm a bit slower, but I think I'm making pretty good progress with Indy too.