Yesterday I went to the barn to see Sophie. Still no saddle but we've been bonding through grooming and mane braiding. I misremembered when Kim said the farrier was coming and by the luck of fate pulled into the drive as the farrier was working on Sophie's feet. So I was able to give him a check and watch him in action (as well as Sophie's behavior). She was a very good girl, even standing in the other barn, where she's never been before. She is a conundrum, sometimes she adapts to new situations without batting an eye and other times she has a meltdown as if the world is coming to an end. I'm very glad that getting feet done was not a meltdown situation though. Her feet look great though, I just hope she makes it to the next shoeing without losing a shoe.
I hung around at the barn for a while, talking to Kim, brushing/braiding/fly spraying Sophie, and just as I was getting ready to leave Hayley asked if I wanted to ride her horse that night. At first I was going to pass but remembered I had a pair of breeches in the trailer and of course my boots/helmet are always in the trailer. So I agreed to ride Hayleys horse and it was awesome, because it turned into a full blown lesson with Kim on a Third Level horse.
He was kind of lazy to my leg because he's used to spurs, was testing me, and my legs are much weaker right now than they were last fall, but we did pretty well together. I even managed to sit his trot pretty well, which Kim said is very hard for people to do on their first ride with him. One of the hardest things to adjust to was collecting him enough for his level. I kept trying to do a training level frame with him and not asking him to be up enough. But I muddled through.
We did a couple of neat exercises. After I got the aids down for walk/trot/canter/bend/etc we worked on shoulder in and travers down the long side. Then we worked on cantering a 10-meter circle where Kim pointed out that I had to think about moving the shoulders over to really get the circle size down, which makes sense as that's the feeling I had with Jessie when we were almost pirouetting in the past.
After I got the hang of cantering a 10-meter circle we had a short break and then worked on a new exercise. Trotting down the long side, first half doing shoulder in, then a 10-meter circle at the middle letter, then travers down the rest of the long side, repeat at the next long side. We did that a bunch of times in both directions and then started working on half pass!
First we started working on just half pass from the quarter line which proved pretty difficult for me. So then we started with going across the centerline and asking for shoulder in and then haunches in on the diagonal line. That worked a bit better, but what really helped was trotting down the long side, doing a turn so that we were on the quarterline and then half passing back toward the long wall. That got us the best results, but mainly the last few steps toward the wall. It was still fun though and a great learning experience.
