One step forward, two steps back....

...intentionally of course!

Friday's blog, sorry for the delay!! Firstly our step...actually leap forward :-)

Did a little bit of boxing, just brought Baby B straight over from the field to the box, stood her at the side of it whilst I popped my hat and gloves on, walked over to the ramp, I got on the box and b*gger me Bally just walked straight on!! She did stop midway if I'm going to be really picky about it, but I just said "come on then" and she did *huge grin*

We stood on the box for 15 minutes, she had her dinner and I moved about creating a bit of wobble. She had a bit of a waaaaah moment when I leaned over and opened the slide down window - cue about ten seconds of tap dancing (which seemed like forever!)...but once again even though she had a paddy she didn't attempt to turn and leap off the box *yay* and she calmed straight back down again *double yay*
As ever I asked her to back off once we'd had a good few minutes more of nice calm behaviour and she very daintily walked backwards down the ramp getting loads of praise.

Then I took her out for a wander, just me, her a simple rope halter and the lead - a step back from roller and longlining - I wanted just a me 'n' ma pony wander, not a schooling session (of course it is still beneficial as there's always something to work on...just wanted less pressure tonight after the longlining tangle)

We had a lovely time pootling around the fields, up and down the steep bit of track because we both like it lol! We did some trot, halt, walk, trot, back, trot, walk transitions - working from voice and body language as I wanted to get the idea (particularly halt) back in her head from voice as it had been noticeably wibbly when we'd lunged.

We did have a proper OMG moment out on the flitch path on the way back to the yard - she spotted a very large and very old unused gatepost to the left - this thing is about 5ft high and 12" x 12"...pretty substantial - she's been past it a fair few times...but she caught sight of it, slammed the anchors on, went in reverse and started dragon snorting at it!!
I was pretty much nonplussed as, like I said, she's walked past this post no problem before....
So I walked over and stood by it, a couple of snorts and wibbly wibbles later and she very bravely joined me. I just stood there and let her have a sniff and then we worked on getting her happy and comfortable to circle past it with her between me and the post...she got it - and without trying to barge me out of the way to get away from it lol ;-)

Back to the yard through a couple of fairly hefty puddles (which were happily tippytoed through) and we were done.

Great fun!

It dawned on me that with the extra hours I'm doing at work I'm rapidly going to be running out of daylight to continue or walks out in the evenings...we have a floodlit school, so playing about in there during winter is no problem. So for the next few weeks I'm just going to concentrate on the box training and wandering out and about whilst we still can in the daylight and save school stuff for when we can't. I'm vaguely planning on keeping this current level of "work" up through to the start of January, letting her have a month or two off (hmmm that'll make for an interesting blog... ;-) ) and then come March next year re-starting work seriously on an escalating 8 week programme to work on fitness and preparation and actually backing her at the beginning of May (whoohoo!)