Month Two!

Monday marked the first day of my second month with Gwen. I can't believe it's already been a whole month! I think we're doing really well. I'm getting down to the barn between five and six times per week, which is right where I wanted to be. Though we started really slow, mostly due to my own laziness, we've really picked up speed now that I have more focus and more "plans" for what to do each day.

The past two days I've begun riding her, and it's something I'd like to keep up. I ride her bareback for now, as I like to feel the way she moves beneath  me, to see if she's tense or relaxed. In the saddle, she tends to be tense all the time, and I'm not sure if it is because of me, or because of the saddle (leaning toward the saddle idea, since she's been mostly relaxed when I ride bareback). I've stopped using a bridle with her, however. For the past two days, I've simply knotted my leadrope around to create a "parelli hackamore", or training bridle, for her instead. In the past, I've noted a bit of opposition to the bridle/bit. It's not outright fear or hate or anything like that, but I've noticed that she kinda shuts-down when I saddle and bridle her. I think the only thing going on is that she associates it with the "old way" of things, back when people just got on, rode, and then got off without really playing with her or engaging her in some way. Since I know exactly who trained her, I know for certain she was never abused or hurt with any of the equipment, but I do notice a signification attitude change between halter/online, and when I saddle her. So, in an effort to disconnect those things from me, I've chosen to do the bareback/halter thing for now :)

The first time I got on her (i.e. Monday) she had a small "shut down" moment where she kinda went robotic on me, rather than being her perky, happy self that she is when we're online. All I did was have her walk around, and I let her chose the direction we went so long as we were moving forward. We were alone in the ring, so I didn't mind if she did donuts or cut corners, since there was no one else to run into/cut off. Before I got on her, we did some on-line stuff in the round pen, which involved us doing the circle-game at a trot for the first time (and she did fabulous!) so the walk around the arena was our cool-down chill-out time before she went back outside.

Yesterday, I was very short on time, so I abbreviated our online time to some simple friendly-game and porcupine/back up. Then, I knotted my rope and hopped back up bareback. This time, we were not alone in the arena, so I had to have some say in the direction we went so that I didn't cut off the other girls. I'm happy to say that she did a lot better, attitude-wise, than she had on Monday. Yesterday she was interested, looking around, checking things out, and had a little pep in her walk. Again, we kept it to an easy walk, and I only guided her to keep her on the rail and out of everyone's way.

I'd like to keep up with riding her almost daily, even if all we do is walk around. On evenings when I've got enough time (which is usually the case) I'll try to do our online stuff for a bit first, and then hop up after.

J