Day 169

I love days like today. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, it's perfect weather for riding.

I started by switching up where every one stands on the cross ties and started brushed Nina for a change (my brother was MIA). I never noticed how RED her coat is. It's so red it's almost purple, kind of. Then I tried to brush out her ears and she wasn't having any of it, so I got the carrot stick out for the first time in a while and started rubbing her ears with that and giving her carrots whenever she stayed still for a couple of seconds. By the end of it, she was staying pretty still, but when I brushed them she still fidgeted around and moved back and forth. My brother really needs to work on that. But I'm happy I got some bonding time with little Nina.

I rode Harry with his fruit basket first. My mom taught me what she's been working on with him, working him on a circle and pushing his rear kind of off of the path of the circle so that his back feet cross over every time he steps so he has to think about walking. We did that for a while and then I took him out on the board. I tried to largo him, but I wasn't able to give him my complete attention, which I felt bad about and really tried to, but it just wasn't happening and I didn't want him to suffer because of it, so I gave him over to my mom to ride and I got on Brie.

I took Brie into the outdoor arena after going around the indoor a couple of times and we corto'd around out there. Then I had my dad set up a little X jump out of two boards and a couple of traffic cones so we could go over it. Brie just wanted to charge the thing down every time we turned to approach it! She never refuses a jump (so far), so it was more for me to try and fix my posture going over it. By the end of it with my mom coaching me I had a better posture than at the beginning, but still not quite as good as necessary. I didn't want to stress Brie's joints too much, so we took a long walk around the property with Harry and Nina afterwards. She started out really calm but once we started heading back towards the barn she was GO GO GO! I was just focusing on trying to get her to not run into the barn, and actually had to turn her around so she wouldn't face the barn and do sidepasses to get in front of the door to go in straight without running herself or me into the siding! What a goof.

We still don't know if we're going to Nationals, but I really don't even want to anymore. It's so disappointing and because of everything that happened I didn't really enjoy myself as much as I could have today, which is even more upsetting...