Jetta's awesome!

We had such a good ride yesterday! I thought she was going to be a brat based off of how she was for our lesson and the day before I just went for a trail ride in the sidepull.

Anyways, I decided to get a head start on my goal of improving our ground manners. I lunged her in the rope halter which I haven't done for a while. I've kind of stopped lunging her because it's hard with so many people in the arena and when I do lunge her, I just do it in the bridle because she is such a pain! She pulls and leans and nothing you do can make her cut it out. But she was awesome today! We needed a little reminder on cues, paying attention when I ask her to go and listening to voice cues when I want her to slow down. I put out the barrels and lunged her over them. Sometimes Jetta just has good and bad days with jumping. Her bad days she will run out and refuse the jumps, but not today! I love it when she pricks her ears and locks on the jump and goes for it. I set the barrels up to their full height, about 3 feet and she was pretty hilarious. She's getting a lot better about using her body but she still rockets herself over with her hind end and her front end gets all wonky. After seeing her jump the barrels I was a little nervous about jumping her in the saddle.

After having way too much fun making her jump on the lunge line I just hopped on and worked on lengthening and shortening our stride and using half halts to bring her bak to me. Then we jumped the barrels and she was great! I made her take a collected trot in and she didn't speed up or run out on the jumps and she moved away nicely after the jump and I was able to do a nice halt with her. So good! Then after that, we had a super nice stretchy trot going on. It takes her a while because at first she speeds up and will only stretch for a second but after she realized that she really can slow down and really stretch, she loves it.

So overall it was just a fantastic ride and I was really happy with it. It's so nice when I get a nice ride early in the morning because it just makes my whole day! I wish I had some pictures of her jumping to show how she's improving! Maybe I'll get ML to do some soon. We were talking about her giving me some pointers while I jump, that way she gets more experience instructing and I get someone to yell at me to get my shoulders back!

On a somewhat side note, I'm watching the recording of Rolex that my parents did for me on TV and I love watching it!!! So awesome. I love watching Mary King. How amazing it was to see her win, she just seems like an awesome person. Wow. Cross country was quite interesting. I heard about all the crashes but geez! I've never seen so many crashes and almost every single horse I watched brushed or hung a leg on multiple jumps and most people just look like they had a rough ride. I'm so jealous of all the 20-something riders hat competed, how lucky to be so young and competing at such a high level! Oh and don't you just love the commercials for Rolex? I just think they're so completely awesome :)



Mary King's well-deserved victory lap