Saturday 12/6 – It was barely raining at home, but 10min away at my barn it was raining hard…so, I drove out there to find myself just watching the group of 5 buried in the hay and left well enough alone.

Sunday afternoon I took off during nap time with the intent to ride.
I went to get Tesla who is definitely no longer black, but the lovely color of mud!
Spent a while brushing and getting the mud out.  Not very successfully, oh the joys of wet winters.

One thing I learned…no treats! I had some in my pocket and therefore we spent the time tacking up dancing around…trying to get at the treats.  He was kind of cute though, as while I took a glove off to de-tangle a wind knot he grabbed it from between my knees and played with it.  Also, grabbed at my zipper pull playing with my jacket.

Once we were past all that, I took him out to the arena to work do some ground work.  “Sending” to walk around me in a circle is very difficult for him.  After a few tries we moved on to just working on trotting out together, me changing directions and just kind of playing in the arena.  I let him off and he still continued to follow me around and stick by me while I ran around silly. 

And since no one else was around, we went back out to get tacked up.  I do need to find a bit that fits better I think, but he isn’t overly mad about it.  We will try a few out, we have time before the spring rides to iron it all out!

I changed pads to an Equipedic with inserts and we rode around the arena a bit.  We worked a lot to the right, which is his “less strong” direction and I worked on learning his rhythm.  Which felt harder to do in the arena than out on the trail!