Settling in Nicely

I’m so freaking proud of Scarlet and how easily he has adjusted to moving to a new place. The first rides had a bit of tension but on Wednesday and Friday, I literally didn’t feel a difference.

Since we have been out of consistent riding, I still am not asking him to work as hard as I normally would. I did insist on working, though. Wednesday, I wanted his walk to be forward and more connected than I  had let him be previously. Since he didn’t have any tension from anxiety or fear, it wasn’t going to cause him to get more anxious. He was reluctant, as anyone is when asked to work harder but I kept after him and he finally connected his head to his legs and walked on. We didn’t work super hard on Wednesday, just a normal w-t-c with a few walking ground poles. But, it was hot enough that he was pretty sweaty when we finished.

After the ride, I was able to get him to stand in the crossties. He isn’t relaxed, but he is in there and tied in. He tossed his head a bit and kept trying to move forward but did listen when I told him to step back and then stand. It was nice to be able to not worry about him moving while I’m picking out his hooves. He did get anxious when I left his side to go put away the tack. So that is still a work in progress.

Thursday is our new day off for the week. It’s the day my husband usually has the longest commute back in traffic so I agreed to try to cook dinner on that day of the week. This week, that didn’t happen as I took our young cat Koro to the vet. She has been barfing every two-ish days for about 10 days. We thought it might just be a hard to hack up hairball but it kept going even after we started to give her petroleum jelly to help move the hair. So we took her in and got a blood test done, just in case. It came back perfectly clean and the vet explained that she might not be the type of cat that has a formed hairball. So they recommended that we keep up the jelly treatment since she is happy to lick that up. She puked on Friday and it actually had a decent amount of hair in it so that may be our solution.

Friday, I asked Scarlet to work more in his trot and walk. We worked on connecting more and then did some transitions within the trot. Scarlet is really good at transitioning to a lengthened trot but he really does not like to be asked to come back. He does come back, but will not maintain it without me asking constantly. He will maintain a lengthened trot though. So we do need to work on that as transitions help a lot with balance and getting him to use his back. His canter was quite good. Easy transitions upward and a nice forward pace. We probably could have been a smidge more forward but there were a couple of other horses in the arena so I did not want to push too much.

Since he did so well for me, I trotted him over these itty bitty crossrails that were set up in the arena for fun. He definitely perked up at that and decided, nope we aren’t trotting out, and proceeded to hop over the first in the line and canter out. Silly boy. He was really up after the handful I let him go over so I did some more cantering and then some trot figure eights to bring him back to me before letting him walk and cool out.

Saturday we didn’t ride due to having plans for my husband’s birthday but I did go see him in the morning and let him roll.

I’m really happy with how all of our rides have gone. We’ve only ridden in one arena since we got to this barn and I think my project for this next week will be to try some of the other arenas now that he is all settled in. Its hard to do really concentrated flat work in an arena that is filled with jumps so I need to get him used to at least one arena without jumps in order to get that done.