Are we Making Progress Here??

Well it has been a couple of days since I have been able to get on and ride Ebony who we just got back from the trainer's Saturday night. Our first night of riding we knew something wasn't right with her and upon investigating her we found that she had started milking again because we put her out on our 5 acre pasture up front here so that she would be easy to catch, but we have the yearlings out there also and one of those yearlings is her filly Ellie. They had been separated for over 9 months but I guess with her that wasn't enough. So we moved her to the 17-20 acre pasture out back.

Ebony's yearling Ellie..


So today we decided that to ride her we were going to take her to our friends house and use their riding arena, in hopes to have Ebony's full attention so we could work better. Of course since we were going there we took DD's rodeo horse Pete and let her and her bestie Tay ride.

My beauty Ebony!!


Well as we started our workout Ebony was pretty set on returning to where her halter had been removed as to say OK I'm done now! Ha not gonna happen!! We worked first through some bending exercises, and moved on to just walking the arena for a bit. Every time we would circle the arena she would always want to stop in the same place, so we reversed and went the other direction. It didn't make a lot of difference but it was enough to keep her attention in the right place. From that point as she continued to have issues with that spot we circled large circles until she would ride through without stopping. We then moved on to a slow paced trot and up to a fast paced trot. It is a bit difficult for me to do these gaits because of my back however my new theory is "it's not going to fix itself, so it will either get worse and they'll fix it. Or it will stay the same and I will deal with it"!! One issue I spoke about in my first post about her training is that they continued to use martingales on her which I wasn't totally thrilled with because that was something we wanted her graduated from...Well I am not riding her in martingales, I would typically use a tie down on a horse who carries their head to high but with Ebony she isn't carrying her head high she just doesn't respond as well...She is also very tender mouthed so I have to be very cautious to not pull the bit to harshly on her. Of course I say that but when she is throwing a fit I am pulling her head down to my knee in a hurry and that does hurt her a bit. Hubby nicely reminded me that the trainer said if you frustrate her she will lose all attention span to you, well I told him I don't care if she gets frustrated at that point because she is not behaving and she needs to be corrected not babied. Another thing we are not allowing for her right now is a full lope, because she needs to master her steering at all of the other gaits first!! I did walk the pole pattern with her when I was working on getting her attention back and I agree with the trainer that she will be a great pole bender. She has great flex, and moves her butt out pretty quickly, so I am excited to see what the future holds for her!! So for our riding session tonight we got a good 2 hours in, which I was thrilled with!! And hopefully we will have her back out within the next couple of days...May be a little hard to do as DD has a softball game tomorrow night, then we rodeo Friday and Saturday, and then Sunday Justin has a football game for a special passing league he is playing in...OHH I will figure it out LOL!!

Of course being that I was on the horse this time I have no riding pictures to share with you :( I will work on that next time LOL!!