Learning to cope with chaos...

Every time I ride this little mare I forget that she is so green. She is doing so well. The thing is, once she knows something, she REALLY knows it! We've been working on side passing in hand over the last week, and I've started leading her through gates exactly as if we were opening it from in the saddle. This was she has to side pass up to it, stand while its opened, and side pass to push it open, then shut again. Tonight I hardly had time to cluck to her before she scooted right up to the gate. What a good girl! Next is doing it on top! She knows so much already. The thing is she is super smart so I guess I've been pushing ahead to keep her from getting bored by being drilled with the same stuff over and over again. I think giving her a lot of different things has kept her fresh and engaged.

We are still are tackling the green horse things though. Tonight for example, we had to share the arena. This is something we don't do much. It was a new step, and a very useful one if I'm going to ride her in a busy show arena on Sunday! The arena is small, and there were two other horses in there. One was a beginner rider who practically rode over the back of us while we were standing in the middle. The other was the barn owner warming up a horse and doing a lot of stop, go, stop, spin, go... etc. Then beginner rider exits, and a young guy gets on the now warmed up horse and decides to do a whole bunch of loping and roll backs. It was absolute chaos! It was the most fantastic test for Lola to have to learn to cope. She did pin her ears occasionally, which I responded to by asking her to get busy doing something. She did spook sideways once, but nothing naughty that we couldn't recover from. Over all it was a great learning night. Another box on the long list of things she needs to experience has been checked.