The Plan

Sorry for being so quiet... There's just so much going on right now and I can't tell you how much I want it to be summer right now! I have two and a half weeks left of school so I just need to survive the rest of this term...

Anyways, on top of school and preparing for finals (yuck) I am also trying to ride Jetta a bunch. You might remember that I was having a hard time with school and horse so Jetta was only getting ridden once or twice a week. Needless to say, riding her four or five times a week nearly triples my stress level, but I want to be prepared for the HT in three and a half weeks. Can you believe that I'll only have a week from the time I get out of school till the HT?! That's too soon! I had two weeks last year.

So here is The Plan in preparation for the HT. Today we are going to go school cross country yet again. Poor Jetta will likely be sick of it by the time the actual HT rolls around. But I plan on making it so that the xc jumps are no big deal like they used to be. Since I don't have access to a truck today, we are walking down the road which won't be too bad save for the fact that I am going to lug my lunge line, halter and carrot stick along with me too. I'm sure we'll be an interesting sight.

Then on Saturday we entered a one-day horse trial at the same location. Really nervous about it (I don't want to make a fool of myself and get eliminated on xc) but I just have to think of it as what it really is - a schooling show. I entered Novice but after getting dumped I realized that there's no way Jetta's going to jump the Novice xc jumps so I emailed the secretary and she was super great about moving me down to Beginner Novice. I felt like Intro would be too small, so hopefully I made the right decision. The goal is to increase Jetta's confidence.

Then we have a while until school gets out. Jetta will move home on the 15th or 16th which I'm actually super excited about. I know some people don't like all the work that goes into caring for your horses - feeding, watering, cleaning stalls, etc. but I enjoy having that control over my horses care and I get to walk basically 10 steps out of my house to the barn.

We have entered a clinic on the 19th where we will do a dressage Ride-A-Test for a trainer. Basically we ride the test we'll be doing at the HT and the trainer will give us a score. Then the trainer gives us some pointers in a mini-lesson and then we ride the test again and hopefully improve our score. I've never ridden with this trainer before but it will be nice to get some insight into how our dressage is looking since we never got a chance to go to a dressage show. KO will also be giving jumping/cross country lessons as well. I'm considering asking her to ride Jetta over the course for me since I'm lacking the confidence to give Jetta confidence to jump the scary jumps. Plus, KO has legs and abs of steel so if anyone can make Jetta jump something she doesn't want to it will be her!

Then the 24th through the 26th is the Inavale Horse Trials! I'm super excited but also slightly nervous. I don't care how we place as long as we don't get eliminated so I hope all this stuff that we're doing in advance will help. I almost thought about not entering, but I think I'm still going to. It really is a lot of fun no matter how well we do and I think I'd be disappointed if we didn't do it. The deadline for entries is the 5th so I'm probably going to wait up until that day to send my form in, just in case I decide to back out...