Lady Earns Her Keep

     I haven't been able to do a whole lot with my horses the last two weeks. Do to quite a bit of traveling I was only able to do stuff with the ponies in between all busyness of life. I should be able to spend more time with them the next couple of days which I am happy about. Who doesn't like to spend time with their horses? I know that I miss it a ton when I can't.

     On one of those days in between I got to put Lady to good use. I had Lady earn her keep so to speak. Lady gave her first official kid riding lesson. She made me excited and proud of her. This is why I wanted her in the first place! I wanted a horse that anyone could come over and ride. Personally I love giving riding lessons which is another reason why I was excited to get her. Lady has quickly become part of my zoo family. ("the zoo" is what I call all of my animals/pets) I really am liking her a lot.

     The lesson itself went really well I think. Lady behaved well and listened pretty nicely to her rider. The rider was an 11yr boy (who is a cousin of mine) who loves horses. This was his first time riding Lady of course so considering that I think they worked together good. I had them start out with just riding around the ring and getting used to each other. Once they seemed more relaxed I had him start do some steering exercises. Basically we started out with a figure eight and then got more complicated from there. I ended up putting a couple of poles in the center between the two buckets I was using for the figure eight thing and I had him maneuver Lady through the poles. Once he could do that I had him halting her in the middle of the poles every time he and Lady went through them. I pretty much had him doing an obstacle course with her.

     The second part of the lesson was a little more fun. In amongst my collection of horse books I have one the is full of just games you can play of horseback. Its a pretty sweet book. I was going through that particular book the other day and I found this game using a catalog. It sounded pretty fun so I thought I would have said lesson student person above play it. The idea of the game was that you would have a catalog (in this case a Dover Saddlery catalog) sitting on a bucket at one end of the arena. The rider and their horse would be at the other end of the arena. I would then give you a number of a page in the catalog, say go, and then you would have to ride to the other end of the arena. Once you got there you would hop off flip through the catalog until you found the correct page number, rip that page out, mount your horse, and ride back to the start. All the while I would be timing you to see how fast you could do it. The game was a hit. I think he (and Lady!) liked it a bunch. I even played it! We had a lot of fun with that one. I'm going to have to try out some more of those games out of that book...