No sun.. but no Rain yet either

Today was supposed to be an inside paperwork catch up day, but... it didn't rain! I have ridden 6 days in a row!!!! YAHOO. Yay for Christmas break. But I put off a bunch of paperwork, and... then it didn't rain. So.. I at least worked on the schedule and got that caught up.. and then I decided that I would go ride and do paperwork later... like this weekend when it's supposed to be raining again the whole weekend. Or when it's dark. :) So we did. We went out and I was torn on whether to trail ride or dressage or jump. I opted to do some dressage because I figured the arena's might be closed for a bit.

We had a nice ride. We did a loop around the XC field to warm up and got to chat with some friends for a bit. Then we headed to the arena. We had some nice work. We got some nice lateral work and some super nice (at least they felt like they were super nice) shoulder in and travers. We got an awesome trot lengthen too!! (Probably not a true medium yet, but... ) I think anyways. I felt like I was able to sit it and still lift my core and life his withers and shoulders and encourage reach through the shoulders without getting flung out of balance.  I do think I was wiggling his nose a little bit too much in an effort to keep him from getting too big. BUT... props to me.. I don't think I was pulling his nose down. If anything, he was probably a bit too above the bit, but much better than me pulling his shoulders down. So we'll see what Cindy says. We also worked on the canter transitions. I did do the 3 loop serpentine but focused more on the canter transitions. We got some decent ones. We might be getting the hang of it. Both of us. I just need to stop overthinking it, but not entirely. My inside shoulder has to actively be back and I need to make sure I'm asking on the correct upswing of his limbs. But not more than that.. more than that and I screw it up. ;) We even had some really decent (for where we're at) canter to walk to canter figure 8's. I didn't do the whole 3 loop yet because I didn't want to confuse him. But we got some really nice transitions with very minimal trot steps and one or two without any trot steps. :) Oh, we also worked on the reinback which.. got better, but still needs some help.
 

 This picture is so cool. :) It's at the water complex in the cross country field but it looks like nothingness. :)

We did a quick video to show how squishy it was. And this is BEFORE the rain comes. Sigh...