Such Troopers!

I am so proud of my two horses - Colton and Jetta are just improving every time we ride.

Unfortunately I haven't been too good about riding both horses every day, I usually have enough time and energy for only one. And add in the fact that it has been pouring down rain the past two weeks! I don't appreciate riding in the rain. I try to avoid it, lol. This is ridiculous, it is not summer - some other strange season where it is warm and the sun shows up occasionally, but mostly it rains buckets. Ugh.

More about Colton later, but this post is going to be about Jetta. She is such an awesome pony!! For the most part. Here at home there is no indoor arena, just my pasture or the neighbor's outdoor arena. Jetta is not an outdoor arena kind of horse. She gets so excited and unfocused, she has developed the world's worst canter. Short choppy steps and a tight back in response to the fact that I won't let her go fast and it takes a million and one stretchy circles to get her to relax a bit. Of course she's always better when I bring out the jumps and since we had a show over the weekend I decided we needed to practice jumping... the night before. I am the queen of procrastination. We schooled over a 2' combination (I only have so many jumping blocks so it's impossible to make up an actual course) since that is Jetta's weakness, she always wants to duck out at the second jump, but she had no problem this time! Then since I was planning on doing a 3' jumper course I figured we'd better practice that too. But the jump block combinations can't get to 3' (at least I couldn't figure it out!) and I could only get 2'9" or 3'3". So we went with the 3'3", I was just crossing my fingers that she jumped it and didn't decided to dump me.

She was amazing! She jumped it once in both directions, albeit in one direction she trotted before the jump and didn't have enough impulsion to make it over cleanly, pulling the rail down. But I was quite pleased - first time jumping that high! And it looked HUGE to me.

Despite the lack of jumping practice, Jetta did pretty darn good at the show! Now if I can just get my lazy butt up in the saddle and practice, we'd be pretty awesome.

We did 8 classes. It was a lot, but I had fun and it was a great experience. We started out with a 2' jumper class just to get in the ring. Jetta was good, no refusals but we had a touch or two so we ended up with one fault. She hesitated quite strongly at a lot of the jumps with all of their bright flowers and gates and such, but was ultimately good. We got 2nd out of 3.

Next was all of the 2'6" classes. They had a deal to enter the low, intermediate or high classes as a package, so I entered all of the intermediate classes, which included a lot of hunter classes that I wasn't really planning on doing. Jetta's more of a jumper than a hunter. But we still did pretty well. I wasn't expecting that we'd be able to go in the show ring and warm up over all of the fences! So that was an unexpected bonus.

We ended up getting four fourth place ribbons out of 7 to 8 competitors. Jetta was very, very good. I was quite amazed, she felt like she was growing up! Our main downfall was that we didn't have flying changes and everyone else did. For the most part she'd land on the correct lead, even without me asking since I was just concentrating on getting over the fences, but a few times she'd land on the incorrect lead. I didn't feel too bad about it though, since all of the other riders were talking about their next A level competition and had much older, more well-trained horses. Jetta's only six so while we should be working on changes, it's not so bad that she doesn't have them down yet.

Other problems were she kept rubbing one fence, almost every single time. It was a gray fence with red flowers on a diagonal. Then she was also leaning on the bit. It's always been something that we have to work on in jumping - getting her head up, but in the two flat classes we did, it was a pain. When her head was up, she felt awesome - balanced, light on the forehand and ready to jump.

We did enter a 3' jumper class, just for fun, but I ended up scratching since I was exhausted and I'm sure Jetta was too. It was getting a little toasty out too! So we'll save that for next time...

Hopefully we'll get some lessons and keep on improving. It was a great show, I had never been out to this barn before and it was super organized and easy going. A great schooling experience, Jetta even earned some compliments on her cuteness and that she was a good jumper!

I will upload some pictures soon, once the internet quits being a pain :(