Prince: Doing simple things with excellence

June 11 2010

This morning I played with Prince for a little bit in the corral. It was really interesting! My focus today was on doing simple things with excellence.... or at least we were trying ;) Since Level 4 is basically doing Level 1 with excellence I decided to try doing the first couple Level 1 Online things on the self assessment chart... again with excellence. So first of course was haltering with savvy!! It was very fun. Prince did very well. There is one little tiny thing that I need to change but I over all it went just like it normally does, very smooth. 

Then we did some different friendly games. I rubbed Prince all over with the carrot stick. He actually fell asleep while I was doing that. It was a "How interesting" moment for me because I realized that Prince doesn't really fall asleep very often when we are together. Except for some times when we are riding and standing still helping my mom. He was a little tense when I was rubbing his head. I know why too but I shall discuss that later on. After that I did some other friendly games and tried to have good rhythm. It was really interesting. 

After that it was Porcupine games!! I have really come to love this game, yes our porcupine game always needs to be improved but I think that is why I love it so much! Because the better it gets the better everything else gets! But then it is like that with all the seven games ;) First we did backing up by the nose. Prince has gotten really light and we are now playing with speed and distance. These are coming a long really quickly. Hindquarter yields were really easy. Prince pivoted a full circle and kept his one front foot still. At the end you would see the spiral in the ground! It was really neat. We did that both ways and then went to the forequarters. This was a little bit more challenging. Prince was all over the place. So I switched to driving game just to help him get his shoulder over. Now this is where I had a BFO. Prince, for what ever reason, isn't moving his shoulder over as fast as he moves his face and neck... and that carries over to our riding in so many ways! Once I really started thinking about it it was incredible how it is effecting our riding I now understand why I am having problems with anything that has to do with circles, because when I ask Prince to move over or to get back on the circle etc he moves his head over but not his shoulder and we end up going in the same direction. 

I had noticed this before while I was riding but I didn't clue in that it was effecting so much. And it also explains why Prince is gets a little tense when I rub him when the carrot stick near his face. I was bothering the wrong zone so it wasn't fair and instead of getting dominate he got worried..... "HOW INTERESTING" This is fascinating! It took a while for Prince to start moving his shoulder over but I rewarded the slighted try and he learned quickly. When we ended Prince was doing just over half a pivot and he was moving his everything that needed to be moved, together. I am excited to see how this shall effect our riding. I know it will. Hopefully this upcoming week we shall be able to play with it. 

After that Prince and I just hung out together for a bit. When I let him go he stayed with me and so I scratched him and then went over and sat on the edge of the manger and spend some undemanding time with all the horses. 

Naturally,

~Keri