New Milestones

Well, this past Tuesday, the boys and I reached a new milestone. We all learned how to pony. Gus was the pony-er, Gringo the pony-ee and me? I was the overseer (aka rider). It was a lot of fun. Gus was a SAINT. Gringo decided to shove his nose up Gus's butt and well, Gus didn't appreciate that at all but he was so good about everything. No pinned ears, no kicking, no squealing, nada. Just one very good boy. Gringo - hmm, we despite it all, he was a very good boy too. He just wasn't too sure about all the fuss I was making on the top of Gus's back. And he despised trotting behind Gus.

I plan on doing more pony work in the future as it kills two birds with one stone and allows me to work both horses, abit non-traditionally.

Wednesday was lesson day and it went fairly well. We started off lunging (in which Gus was good) followed by some shoulder stretches at the walk. After that, we did butt.to.the.wall and head.to.the.wall leg-yields. Gus was a really good boy for everything, but we figured out that all the stretching in the front end ended up making Gus really sore. He sorta worked out of it, but was still quite uncomfortable.

We proceeded to trot work after that, doing SI at the walk from like F to P, then trotting across the short diagonal to S, then S to H SI again. Rinse and repeat on the other side of the arena.

Canter work was more or less the same thing. Except I *think* we did SI at the trot from say S to V, then from V to P we cantered, then from P to R trot, then rinse and repeat. We had some nice moments ... definitely still have issues with the right lead canter currently - as it's more difficult for Gus to maintain that lead for any length of time.

On another note, Gus has lost a dramatic amount of weight in just a short period of time. C, the BM, asked me on Tuesday if I had noticed any weight loss on Gus and literally just minutes before I was debating as to whether or not Gus had lost some muscle in his hindend. Well, my suspicions were confirmed when she said that they had noticed a few horses drop a lot of weight seemingly overnight. Gus just happened to be one of the unlucky ones. Gringo was not.

I did do some work with Gringo again on Wednesday evening. We attempted to lunge, but quickly cut that short when he ended up lame. So instead we did some in-hand work. As usual, Gringo was a good boy.

I got some pictures ... but as usual, they aren't uploaded yet ...