Saturday, February 19, 2011

Spring: Time to Look Back at Winter

When I had my show horses, I dreaded winter. I don’t like riding in a bunch of layers, my horses were always a muddy mess, and I never had motivation to ride every day like I had to. But, like everything else, things are so different with Sonny.


I still don’t like the cold and the mud, but this winter was my best “horsie winter” yet. Although I didn’t get to ride much, (I only got on him enough times to fit on one hand) I feel like Sonny and I made huge improvements. As always, we played a lot on the ground; Boring stuff like improving our phases and getting more responsive.


More than anything I am really excited on how much our relationship improved over the winter. It always feels so…wrong to me, but the best way to improve our relationship is to do nothing. Sounds funny, right? How can doing nothing get anything accomplished? The more undemanding time I spend with Sonny the more our relationship improves. Because the weather was so nasty this winter and I was so unmotivated, for the first time ever, being lazy actually benefited me :). Not that we didn’t have a great relationship before, but there is a huge difference from the fall to now.

Sonny's pasture pal, Max.


This may sound boring, but I couldn’t be happier with our winter accomplishments. So now that it is warm and sunny (probably not for long), now we can work on other things. It was 62 degrees yesterday so I busted out my saddle and got on. Sonny was so great! We didn’t do much since he hasn’t been ridden in forever, but he was very responsive and had a great attitude. Hopefully our better relationship status will continue to benefit us this year with riding! AND... he didn't look to bad either! I was expecting him to gain a bunch of weight and lose a bunch of muscle and be hairy and gross once winter was over. But, he looks pretty good to me!


Here are my goals for Sonny and I this yearL

1) Ride more (but still put our relationship first!).

2) Work on riding with a bridle.

3) AND work on riding without a bridle haha!

4) Work on stretching better (more for him, not be…we could both do better)

Now that the weather is nice, hopefully we can get a lot more accomplished!



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