Days 279 & 280

Saturday

Today, my goal was to get Brie on the makeshift Pessoa system that my mom created for Harry. In getting her to move her backend away from me, crossing her legs over each other, I've noticed that she is not as good going counterclockwise as she is going clockwise, but she is making great progress. She knows what I want her to do with that now and she is working to do it.

She was very confused when I put the makeshift Pessoa on her and only walked, but that was all I wanted from her. We did that only for a short while before I got on her. She is getting better at not cantering the corners, so I'm glad for that. Hopefully, I will be able to bring her to show this year. I'm also working on not letting her canter her reverses, since she has a tendency to do that.

Sunday

Spent a longer time with Brie on the makeshift Pessoa. She is also better going clockwise on that than going counterclockwise. She only walked counterclockwise, but was moving out going clockwise, so that was exciting! She collected her head today, but I didn't feel that same whole-body collection while riding like I did a couple of weeks ago. I took her off of two reins today and went back to using one rein. I'd been using two reins for a while now, I forgot when I started, probably late last year, but she responded very well to one rein again. It was also a lot easier to control her speed, probably because there was only pressure on the bit instead of split pressure between the bit and her jaquima.

I didn't get to ride Harry, but my brother did. He had a bit of trouble at the start, but came around. It's good that he got to ride Harry, he always only rides Nina and none of the rest of us ever get to ride her, so that was a nice change.

I wish I was able to go out and ride every day. We can only stay a couple of hours now on the weekends when we go out because my dad's work schedule changed and we have to come back home really early. It'll probably be really hard to be able to ride more than one horse now, because we all like to each ride for over a half and hour and we only have about an hour to ride if this weekend is any example. I'll have to alternate horses each weekend.