Spring is here, yay!

Ah it has been soooo nice out. Except this weekend when Revi ran her first recognized Prelim and it rained..... but at least it MOSTLY waited until after we were done.

Revi ran another schooling Prelim at Jumping Branch, and did well although still having some dressage tension. Cross-country was a blast! That was the weekend before last. This last weekend we ran the recognized event at Sporting Days, which had beefed up cross-country a bit! I was very happy with how Revi handled that. There were lot of skinnies, a coffin with a huge ditch and skinnies at A & C, a one-stride of skinnies, a huge drop into water, a corner, assorted large tables, etc. and she just cruised around. I am so not worried about skinnies now! Or ditches for that matter. Or water. Stadium and dressage still need work. We have been having a bit of a dressage boot-camp, though (for myself, riding with a crop across my hands to work on improving my position, and for her, working on improving her throughness) and I could definitely tell a difference in her test. Although she was a bit quick, her connection was a lot steadier! As a reward, I bought her a $$ Nathe snaffle for dressage.... (Gee, thanks mom! Revi says--NOT!) It has a thinner center than the Happy Mouth, which should better accomodate her fat tongue, while still being nice and thick at the bars for comfort. And it is a bit more rubbery.

So we are still in dressage boot camp and I'm pencilling in some showjumping boot camp now, mainly just doing more coursework so we are a bit more in tune with each other all the way around. "Head up and run" seems to have disappeared for the most part, so now we can smooth things out a bit more, instead of spending all our time on gymnastics and "just pay attention!" exercises. I am making a point of scheduling time to ride MY horses not just the training critters! Next for Revi is Southern Pines HT this next weekend.... a lot of events in a short span, but then she has a few weeks off.

Jones is doing very nicely, he placed 2nd in the Ark's BN Combined Test in February, and he will make his HT debut in two weeks at Beginner Novice at TTC. I am getting a LOT of inquiries about breeding to him via shipped semen, so I may have to investigate getting access to a phantom and teaching him to use it.

We have two training horses at the moment: Huggy, the 13+h pony making his HT debut in two weeks before heading back to his owner's barn, and Sassy, a 4yo Dutch WB cross who arrived last week and is here for basic manners on up. She had her first longeing lesson today and since she only just learned last week not to ignore and/or run over people, I thought she did quite well! Walked, trotted, and stopped on a circle both ways wearing a saddle.

We presently have one stall open at the barn so I should get organized and put the word out, but it is very nice to have a little extra space so I'm not in a big hurry, either.