A beautiful day!

 Ahhh... what a lovely Saturday! It was warm, sunny, and beautiful out! Dan and I loaded up and went to meet Kelli and Marvin at Ashland. 

We started off in the arena, doing our pillar work and the Jec zig zag in hand. He was a good boy. Then I hopped on. WE started off walking and doing our figure 8 exercise. I even did the square box walk thing that Jacel reminded me about in my lesson with Lyric this morning. Then we picked up the trot and did some slow trotting... our economy trot. He didn't feel as good as he had felt the other rides. But he wasn't lame. I focused on keeping his nose between his shoulder blades so yay for that! But he just felt...I don't know... not good. He was fussy and was biting at his shoulder a little bit. And just... seemed unhappy. His tongue didn't come out though. So, we went back to walking for a bit and went back to our 10 meter figure 8 circle until Kelli was done riding. I wanted her to video so I could send it to Dr. Kate. We picked up the trot again and Kelli was videoing. I focused on just keeping a slight contact but soft and keeping him slow and off his forehand. And, despite that being what I was doing before, he was better suddenly. He got a bit fussy at moments, but he was trying. We did a few minutes of trot and a little bit of canter and it was nice. His canter is still a bit lifted and braced going into it, but it's way better than it was before we saw Dr. Kate. And it had some really nice moments. We finished with a quite lovely trot across the diagnonal. Not a real lengthen but... a baby lengthen. And one of our nicer ones! He stayed nice and lifted and it was a true lengthen, not just a faster trot. We quit with that! Sadly, we didn't quite get the super good stuff on video, but Kelli caught the tail end of it. So... okay! Yay! He almost feels better than he did before we left off. But he's weak still and can't hold it for long. But that's okay! Me too, buddy, me too! And no tongue!!!

Most of our ride

Then Kelli and I talked about the saddle and she took some photos of me in the saddle to see about my jumping position. Yay! Then sadly she had to go so Dan and I went on a solo hack. He was a bit lazy and just wanted to eat all that green grass. I didn't let him go in the lake either because.. not my saddle! But he did drink from the green lake. And then we cheated and had a little canter over the log in the field next to the lake and then another little canter over a tadpole log on cross country. :) :)