There's Always Room for Improvement

Well, I have a show tomorrow. Even though it's on Sunday.
 I rode Santana and gave him a bath.
That sounds like he did perfect... no, he was a pain. So instead of picturing him standing still and enjoying a bath, picture him trying to avoid the water by going in circles around me.

Before that I rode Ana. Well, Aleythia rode Ana, but she thought something was wrong with Ana, because when we cinched her up she layed her ears back and threw her head up, and when Aleythia was moving around in the saddle she also layed her ears back and threw her head up. She was also being a general pain. So, I got on her and got her to walk, and then checked out her trot. I didn't find any problems there except she pinned her ears back when I asked for the trot

We decided that Ana just doesn't have respect for Aleythia so she tries to get away with all these little things.

Guess what I did yesterday?

I rode Ana bareback!
This actually isn't anything new, but it was a lot of fun. This last winter I figured out how to sit her trot, so it is actually fun riding bareback. I figured out that if I leaned forward in the slightest I couldn't stay on, but if I sat on my jean pockets and made sure to not lean forward, just go with the motion and not tense up, I could ride the fastest trot she had. Oh, and we are in the process of teaching her how to  side pass. Surprisingly she can do it quite well. She can't side pass the length of the paddock but she can do it for a couple steps. She gets the concept. I also taught her how to flex at the poll. Now when we are walking or trotting whenever her head is too high and she's going too fast I can get her to flex at the poll, and it calms her down a little bit. Ana has gotten a lot better with how responsive she is and how hyper. I have a photo of her from maybe three or four years ago and Aleythia is riding her. So, you have this little kid trying to get this really hyper horse to slow down and the kid isn't relaxed at all. I'll have to put it up here one of these days. I have a few progress photos of Ana. The one just described, one taken maybe last year, and one of the pictures above. There is a distinct improvement. The reason it has taken us so long to get her to calm down is in part because that's just her character (she's one quarter arabian and three quarters saddlebred for goodness sake!) and also because we really didn't know what to do about it before this year.