Prince: Things happen...

July 19 2010

This morning it was raining but after the rain stopped I went out and played with Prince. We had a pretty good play time but we had some complications with our Figure eights... I will explain later.

We started off with doing one line zone 5 driving. It was really cool because we were playing on the 45ft line so I was able to get even farther behind Prince. It was fun! Prince did really well. We did transitions, pushing the ball, and jumping. Then we did a Weave. I was about 30ft away and Prince did really well. When we went to the trot Prince missed a tire so we did it again and he did a lot better. One thing that I have learned over the past couple weeks since the Ohio Celebration is that it is so easy to micro-manage your horse! Even at phase 1!! We need to give the horse a responsibility! So that is what I did on the Weave. If Prince missed a marker we would keep going but next time I made sure to set it up so that he didn't miss it. It went really well.

We then did circles. We started off to the right and they were so cool! Prince cantered half a circle and it was so soft! I literally thought he was going to break gait because he was cantering so slowly! But he didn't because it was a rhythmic, relaxed canter! It was beautiful! Prince had a harder time going to the left though. He could canter a couple strides but even at the trot he was pulling a lot. So we just did lots of transitions and such and when he cantered a couple nice strides I brought him in. It was really neat though because he got to the point where I didn't even need to cluck any more! I just picked up my energy and sent Prince and he would start cantering! It was really amazing. 

Then we did the Figure eights. They started out pretty good. Since we haven't done them in a while and we were on the 45ft line it was a bit different. After the first couple figure eights they started getting worse. Now I didn't have my 22ft line with me and I regret that because I could have switched to it and things would have been a lot better. I could have been more effective. But alas I didn't have it and so things did get worse. Then I started getting caught up in my rope but thankfully my sister had come outside and she was able to bring my 22ft line up. It took a while but we finally got a nice half of a figure eight so I brought Prince in and gave him a little rest and then we started again. Prince had one side really good and would do really well but the other side was a lot worse. So I think I am doing something different from side to side. 

Things got a little bit better and so we stopped when it was pretty good. Hopefully we will be able to build on it next time. What I should have done was made sure that we could do the figure eights on the 22ft line before we tried them on the 45ft line. But I figured that we would try because they were getting really good on the 22ft line. But hindsight is 20/20 right :) 

Prince was pretty sweaty because it was getting hot out I let Prince go and we spend 30 minutes of undemanding time. I was kind of hoping that Prince would roll and 15 minutes later Prince rolled! He didn't stay down long but that was okay. Prince stayed with me for most of the 30 minutes but every once and a while he would leave for a couple minutes and then come back. It was a nice way to end our play time. 

As I was sitting there I was thinking about our play time and about the things that Prince and I are having the most issues with right now and I realized that on the circle, figure eight, follow the rail and a couple other things Prince has a hard time doing them to the left.... how interesting! I think I knew that before but I just kind of forgot it :) So with that knowledge I am going to go out next time and see how I can help Prince with that. Now the problem could be because I am doing something in my body that isn't helping any so I shall have to be aware of that too. Should be fun! Hopefully we can play with it and get things going better soon. 

Naturally,

~Keri