Don't Ever Tell Your Horse....

That he's about to go back to work. Let him be oblivious. Cuz you know what happens when you tell him? He goes out in his pasture and does this::: 

Warning: if you are grossed out by wounds and/or blood, you probably shouldn't read any further

And this::::

Which looks like this after the vet cuts off the skin flap

Awesome, right? He managed to wound himself on two major joints. The vet flushed his stifle to make sure he hadn't punctured or otherwise damaged the joint capsule. Everything was clear, so fingers crossed it stays that way. Looks like a whole lot of boo boo scrubbing in my future. Darn dollar horse is EXPENSIVE. 

Another Schooling Day

On Sunday we took George out to BCHP for some more XC schooling. If everything went smoothly he would be entered in the schooling trial on August 11. Bucks uses a ditch at the BN level with no option, so we needed to make sure he would go over the ditch before I paid his entry. It took a couple tries and a few awkward hops, but now ditches are not a problem! 

      99 problems, but a ditch ain't one!

We schooled a bunch of other BN level fences, mainly the scary ones, so hopefully there will be no refusals this time! 

                    A scary bench

                  And scary steps

      And a not so scary hanging log with         terrifying giant boulders on either side

I'm feeling pretty confident about the cross country phase, dressage should be fine if I can remember the test, and stadium..... Well, I had a bit of a melt down yesterday when I remembered that BN = the addition of some scary fill under the jumps. 

This was me demonstrating how I would ride to this scary rolltop back in 2012 with Theo

Stay tuned!

On a More Cheerful Note...

At the end of July, while simultaneously prepping Reffy for some more dressagey fun at Burgundy Hollow, I was also prepping someone else for his first BN trial. 

          That's right! George is back! 

              Photo cred. Megan Allen

The original plan was to go Starter, considering he's really only jumped maybe 5 or 6 times, but he totally killed it when we took him up to school XC the week before, so we made the decision to go Beginner Novice instead. 

Now, George is a funny kind of guy. Trot towards a jump and there's a pretty good chance he's going to stop. Or run out. But kick on and canter up? 9 chances out of 10 you're up and over before he could even think about putting on the brakes. He gets all his confidence for jumping at the canter. Our game plan was officially "ride like hell". 

Day Of:

Because of scheduling and me having zero time between phases due to also riding Reffy, we walked the XC course as soon as we arrived at Burgundy Hollow. Cue mild panic attack. They had thrown straw all over some of the bigger fences making them even more scary. And they just happened to be fences we hadn't schoole because they were off the course to be repainted. GASP. 

         No problem. We got this. Ha. 

Dressage was mediocre, George decided staring at the horses out on the XC course was more important than paying attention and not hauling me around the silly white rectangle. I think our score had us in 3rd place. Not too shabby. We had a rail down on the first fence of stadium before I swallowed my nerves and rode like hell! That's fine. Green jumper. Good boy. Cross country was a bit of a mess to start, two refusals in the first 4 or 5 fences, but we got it together and finished the rest of the course, INCLUDING the dreaded green table with straw spread all over it. Woohoo!!! 

We didn't win by any stretch, finished 5th overall in front of one rider who was eliminated. But I was still proud! And many awesome photos were taken. 

       Determined jump face for stadium

         Photo cred. Jeremy Benfield

      Photo cred. Karla Dreisbach 

         Photo cred. Karla Dreisbach

     Huffing and puffing all the way home

        Photo cred. Jeremy Benfield 

YAY GEORGE!!!

Sometimes You Have to Take a Step Back

After my last post and a really bad jump school where Reffy decided he was NO WAY, NOT EVER going to jump or even walk over ground poles, we decided to back away from the jumping and focus solely on our dressage basics and the whole "listening to mom no matter what is going on in the rest of the world" thing. Needless to say I've been a little MEH about the blogging since then. 

My plan for the season had been to start out with the CT in April and be killing in at starter HTs in the summer with the possibility of moving up to elementary by fall. Yeah that's not going to happen. Poor Reffy has such a hard time keeping it together off property we've only muddled through a couple dressage tests since the epic CT fail. It is getting better, but I was admittedly bummed about the whole thing for a while. He continued to go like a dream at home, but being trailer-less and poor I haven't been able to do what he REALLY needs, and that is to haul to every schooling show in a 20 mile radius until its completely old hat to him. 

Which brings us up to the present. We went to a trial over at Burgundy Hollow a couple weeks ago to do just dressage. He was the calmest he's been to date off property, put in two decent Intro tests, made his momma proud, had a whole week off, and was lame the day I planned to start riding again, and has been since.

GAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Horses. Seriously. Sheesh. So it's been about a week and a half since then, he's slowly improving, but it seems to have been a stifle issue and they are notoriously slow to heal. Double bummer.