Intention - Blog Update #1

She looks somewhere between adorable and
possessed in this picture so of course I had to share

Well guys I certainly had no intention of taking that sort of break from blogging! I feel like this year was even a longer break than last year and last year I was dealing with some pretty serious seasonal depression. This year, very happily, the reason(s) I haven't been blogging are very happy for the most part.

Because there is just so much going on and a fair amount happening with Katai I figured I would do a couple of update posts rather than trying to fit it all in one and then be in a good place to recap 2017 and start 2018 strong!

So, to start the update, awhile ago I had mentioned three exciting things I had in the works that I couldn't share yet. One of those didn't really go anywhere yet but will soon and that's that I'll be moving early next year and was hoping to move much closer to the barn. I had started to look for apartments but realized that it was still so early that it didn't make sense to look.

First bath today <3

The second thing was my friends moving to the barn. As of end of October they're all moved in and things are setting back down there. I'm really enjoying having them there and luckily it's a great combination of having people around but still having the arena to myself on a fairly consistent basis. In fact, if I had my druthers I'd probably want them around a bit more than they are which is a good problem to have.Not only am I enjoying having them there but they're LOVING the barn and Jane's instruction. All three of them have said that they're enjoying riding again and loving the program and the setup of the barn. I'm really happy for them and glad that I could help them find a great place to move to.

The third thing is, of course, my new puppy Mashiara or Moshy for short. She is absolutely the best puppy in the entire world and I'm totally head over heels in love with her. Anyone who follows me on Instagram (and if you don't you should since I'm more able to quickly post there) has seen her in all of her adorable cuteness already.

I've LOVED every minute of having rescue dogs but they do come with baggage and I've always wanted a puppy at some point. I have no doubt that I'll mess some things up but it is nice to not need to deal with set in behavioral stuff right from the beginning. It's also AMAZING how quickly she picks things up! She already sits on cue, knows her name, and has a MUCH more reliable fetch than Veggie does. She's also good with stuff like nail clipping and bathes which I'm working hard to not mess up. I guess I sort of didn't think she'd be this trainable since Chihuahua's are typically fairly stubborn little dogs that weren't exactly bred for obedience but so far (knock on wood) she's been really easy to train. I've got her signed up for a puppy class already and now I'm also sort of thinking about continuing with a few basic obedience classes after that puppy class is done.

She's very helpful with Christmas preparations

Of course all of these things have distracted me from blogging and, as mentioned previously, Katai and I had gone through a rough patch and are just in an in-between sort of time with riding where she needs more strength and to change her way of going and those aren't quick things. Because of that I just didn't have as much to blog about which wasn't inspiring me to find the time to sit down and blog.

Contemplating what to do with a toy that large

I have one more thing that's been distracting me from blogging and that's a relationship. I'm not someone who's particularly private and I know I've shared relationship things, both good and bad, on here in the past but this time I'm keeping it more private. What's important is that I'm really happy right now and spending a lot of time with this person. I've been more focused on that and continuing to ride and manage a new puppy and still (STILL!) stressful work days that blogging just needed to take a back seat.

A little blurry but proof of how good the Vegetable has been.
I think this was her second day home.

I can't promise that it's going to get much better over the next few months but I do want to close out the year as strong as I can. I'll have another update soon about more of what Katai and I have been up to!

Exciting Happenings

Old pictures from J's barn

I think I've mentioned, probably a couple of times, that it's been sort of a weird and stressful year for me personally. While the horse things have mostly gone really well (other than the farrier thing recently and not having a saddle so I couldn't ride) other things have just felt like I'm trekking up a steep mountain without enough oxygen and no breaks.

This past week I've finally felt like I can breath a little and I'm getting a little respite and over the past couple of days a few really exciting things have happened!

Unfortunately I'm not at a place to bring up two of those three things in this blog quite yet. One I'll likely have more information on early next week that I can share. Another I likely won't be able to share for at least a few months. The third though I can share just a bit about.

I believe I mentioned that Jane had asked me to post on our local online bulletin board that she had a couple of openings for boarders. I posted and got a really great response and was especially excited when one of my friends, who I boarded with at J's barn, expressed interest. I'd LOVE to board with her again and missed most of the people that I boarded at J's with.

Baby nose and baby lipstick!!! Same bit I'm using now

Over the past month or so she and another person from that barn have visited and taken video of my lesson to show to each other. After that video I hadn't heard much back and it was a rougher lesson than I've had in awhile so I wasn't quite sure how it was received. Last week I found out that the boarder who'd watched the video and not been able to be present for the lesson LOVED Jane (I'm really not sure how you couldn't) and wanted to come tour one more time before making a decision.

Last night both people showed up and they brought another person from J's barn! That's three people from J's and it just so happened that they're the three people I was closest with at Js. Two more family members showed up as well so it was quite the reunion and it reminded me how much I've missed having more people to ride and interact with at the barn. K is AMAZING but her schedule is just so different that I don't see her much. Katai also adored having all of her fans there and I don't think that any of them could quite believe how much different she is than she was at J's.

Baby pony in a really good but rare moment at J's barn
Also, I've really stepped up my ROOTD game ;)

It was great to see all of them and now I'll be on pins and needles waiting to hear if they're going to move in with me and when :) Oh, and figuring out how to consolidate my tack sprawl in the tack room if they do decide to move in.

She's Sound!!!:Lesson Recap 2/28

*This is a warning that starting with the 6th paragraph I'm going to be journaling about how my mind works in regards to my pony. It's probably a little boring and not much about our lesson but I want to write it for myself. Feel free to skip to my next post if it's boring.

I'm so happy right now! I drove out to the barn first thing on Saturday morning and was preparing myself the whole time for her to still be off. When I got there I tacked her up and put on side reins so that I could start off lunging and then hopefully ride after. She still seemed a little tender on the concrete but once she got to the arena footing she looked excellent! I had my fingers crossed the whole time and when I first asked her to trot she was really reluctant so I got nervous but other than clearly being stiff she was sound!

I had her walk, trot, canter each direction on the lunge and then climbed up. Her saddle was really sliding forward badly which I think was a combination of gaining some weight (pony's got a cute little hay belly right now) and losing some muscle behind her shoulders. Under saddle I walked and trotted and when I went to canter I got her first real bronc moment. I looked down and realized that her saddle had really slid forward but made her canter a circle first so that she didn't think that I'd get down for that type of behavior. Then I called it a day.

Today I started off lunging her again. Part of me was worried that after our work yesterday she'd be a little sore again but other than seeming a bit stiff to start out again she was brilliant and very sound. I walk, trot, cantered her again on the lunge and then just as L was getting to the barn I climbed up.

Katai was VERY reluctant to bend her rib cage to the left. This was normal for her but was getting better and better prior to our three week break. Today it was pretty bad but thankfully between her being more mature, stronger, and better trained and me being smarter and better trained we figured it out by the end of the lesson and with very few theatrics from Katai. She had a few stiff, trot sewing machine, canter moments but mainly kept her head about her and she never pulled any rearing or balking crap. After a couple of great stretchy bendy circles in each direction we called it a day before we made her too sore.

I was really happy with that but during my 1/2 hour drive home I always analyze how everything went or felt and after about 15 minutes I came to this sort of stunning realization that the entire time I was riding I was feeding myself self defeating self talk. except it wasn't so much about me, it was about my pony.

See Katai is enough for me, she always will be. I've had these scenarios that I play over in my head when I'm day dreaming where some rich parent comes up to me at a show (where we're showing 2nd level or something) and offers me some outrageous amount for my pony like $50,000 and I turn them down. Katai is literally everything I love about horses, she's my perfect match and there's no way that I'd sell her now or in the future when we are riding at 2nd level.

However, some small part of my brain has always related the amount I got her for (basically free) to her worth. I mean we all probably do it to some extent. There's a big difference between this;

 

 

and this;

Clearly if you had the former you'd blame yourself for mistakes, you'd feel like you could do anything, you'd expect that you'd be riding at a high level fairly quickly and (speaking at least for myself) I would certainly pay for the best instruction and care team that money could buy so that we didn't "mess up" this talented (and expensive) horse.

I'd also spend twice the time grooming that horse, have more chiro appointments scheduled, certainly more massage appointments and I'd have the saddle fitter out more often. I know, I know just because the horse is worth more it doesn't mean that it deserves any of this more than my pony. I truly do understand that Katai deserves everything that that horse does but I would just expect to do those things for that horse while me, and everyone around me, is surprised when I do those things for my pony. It's just the way that human thought process seems to work and it's something I've been fighting ever since I got Katai. I love that I get to do all these things for my pony regardless of the worth that someone might place on her and again, I think that she's completely priceless, but my traitor brain doesn't always play along with my heart in this case.

In the car I realized that today as I was riding I kept thinking that "this little pony just can't do this", "she's not talented", "she's sore because she's not talented", "she's not holding up because she's not a dressage horse", "she can't do dressage", "why are we trying to do this", etc. Despite this clearly not being the case I kept right up with the self defeating self talk.

I mean this is the pony that went from a sewing machine trot to such a long stride that the other local dressage instructor had to move the ground poles closer for a dressage horse she was riding (and not to compress stride). This is the pony that developed a stunning medium trot after less than a year of regular lessons and only about 4 months of a reasonably consistent riding schedule. This is the pony that now canters just off my seat cue and has developed a nice amount of jump to the canter, this is a sound, athletic pony and just about any sound, moderately athletic horse can do dressage at the lower levels but most importantly this is the pony that I chose to ride over any other horse. For me Katai is more than enough, the lower levels are more than enough and I still truly believe that we'll be able to achieve a bronze medal.

My damn brain, but again. This;

vs. this;

In the past when I moved her from the temporary winter barn to the barn with the crazy people I was extremely nervous. For some reason I was sick to my stomach thinking of moving her to that beautiful barn because I was worried that she'd be a little devil and she's clearly a scruffy pony and I'd have to own up to this being my scruffy devil pony. So I tricked myself, I told myself that I was actually moving Charlotte Dujardin's new, talented pony prospect to a new amazing dressage training facility where I'd be helping to exercise her. This pony prospect easily cost charlotte in the 5 figures like this guy and of course was exceptionally trained so she wouldn't have any issues with the move.

It actually worked. I was calm and proud of being able to bring this amazing pony to the new barn. Everyone there gushed over how amazing she was and I truly believe it's because I treated her like she was worth a million dollars. Pretty sad huh that I couldn't just be proud of my own pony. Now I need to do the same thing again only actually remind myself of how much Katai is worth to me. That needs to be enough and unfortunately after all the self defeating I've been doing I'm going to have my work cut out for me to reverse that to get my brain to actually acknowledge how much worth and love my heart has for this pony.

It feels traitorous to even post this here and looking at these pictures I know which I'd choose every time (just a hint, it's not the expensive one) but I'd rather acknowledge it and work on it then keep it a secret.