Resolutions for Lucy

Happy New Year!

Kenny and I spent some time last night coming up with resolutions for 2010. Personally I hate resolutions; I feel like it's my responsibility to continually improve myself, not wait for a calendar date and then madly scribble a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper that I'll lose in the next ten minutes.

That being said, 2010 is going to be a huge year for us. In September, we will be married. We have also talked about buying a house. In addition, Lucy will be turning four and hopefully moving along in her training. For these reasons, I agreed to write down my goals for the coming year.

Naturally, some of my resolutions were horsey related :)

1. First and foremost, Lucy needs to be fat and shiny by the time she sheds out in the spring. I feel like we are on the right track with this, but seriously, nothing will make me happier than seeing lots of dapples and zero ribs.
2. I want to conquer the canter (hehe).
3. I want to take L on trail rides once hunting season is over, because I'd prefer not to get shot this year.
4. I'd really like to start her over fences.
5. Once the spring rolls around, I want to put her in a little green horse walk/trot (or if I'm feeling brave, wtc) class at the barn across the street from mine, which is unfortunately a rather large fancy hunter barn and has hosts large and fancy shows. I'd prefer to go to a small, low-key schooling show where people would probably be more patient and understanding than they might be at a rated hunter show, but we'll take what we can get. We're lucky to have a barn that hosts shows literally across the street from us, so I don't have to pay a shipper to truck L all around Rhode Island.

Today I started the year off right with a fabulous ride. My friend Samera, one of my gorgeous bridesmaids, came and took some video for me. I laughed when I watched the video because I talk through the entire thing! So if you watch it, please ignore my incessant chatter.

Lucy has discovered that she looooves stretching. She loves it so much that she has started asking for it, constantly. Today she almost got a little bit demanding about it. I'm torn as to what to do about this. Normally I'd be like, ohhh good horsie! because I want her to stretch through her back. but at one point she pulled so hard that she almost pulled me right out of the saddle! After that, she got her stretching privileges taken away, and any time she pulled against me, I planted my hands and let her pull against herself. I will have to ask G about this next time I see her...actually, what I really need is to set up another lesson!

We did get some great leg-yields in both directions, some of which you'll see in the video. After Samera stopped recording, we also had a very nice canter to the left and a messy canter to the right.

After I was satisfied, Samera got on Lucy and walked her around to cool out, which was awesome! She has ridden Lucy once before, but doesn't ride on a regular basis. I walked beside them around the ring once, and then let Samera go. She had Lucy walking, halting, circling, and looked awesome through the whole thing. She is my bravest friend!

Here is the video that Samera took.