Today was a fun day. We played with Peri and Kelli and kept up with them. :) Peri had set up two exercises. One was ground poles on a circle... so 3 on each quarter and then a small vertical on the fourth quarter. The goal was to canter them in an even number of strides and then also to use your ground pole as a guide for getting your distances. Or at least that was my purpose to them. It was a great exercise for Danny. And it clued me in too. He's starting to understand but I can't take my leg off to shorten the canter or I just cause him to trot. So we never quite really nailed it, but we got better.
Then she set up a grid. It was a one stride, one stride, two stride, bounce grid. Or something very similar. The striding was set a little bit so it was tight, then slightly long, then very tight. And the very tight was only 8 feet. We started with mostly ground poles but did have the bounce up. And.... you guessed it! Danny jumped the 8 foot bounce like it was an oxer the first time through. Oops! I ended up stretching the 8 foot bounce out a little as it just wasn't fair to ask Dan to figure it out yet. And Peri mentioned afterwards that perhaps Stephen did stretch it out a bit. Who knows?! But for Dan's sake we did. Because it was even pretty darn tight for Tess. So we did it again and he figured out to bounce it. We set up a few more fences in there and then went through again and then raised it a bit and went through again. And then we all quit with that as they were good. :)
Grids for the Danimal
But the exciting part was that Dan was learning! He was starting to really think and process going through rather than just flinging himself through. Yay!! Go baby!
So then we headed to the lake as a reward. Because yes... it is still 74 degrees in mid December! Dan had a blast. Tess did too. At one point Tess either lost her balance or tried to barrel into Dan to kick him... because she came flying into him butt first. Dan was a little clueless, but... it was all good.
Good day!
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