Show Ready?

We are getting to just over 2 weeks out from our first show in forever and it's... going ok.

Jetta has some really great moments and some really terrible ones. I'm almost 100% sure that the terrible moments are just because she's not physically fit enough to carry herself the way I'm asking, but it's still a little frustrating.

"What do you mean I'm frustrating? NEVER"

Our last ride, Jetta warmed up BEAUTIFULLY. We were doing shoulders-in and haunches-in, leg-yields, 10 meter circles, etc. at the trot. It felt great.

And then we cantered and it was all downhill from there. Jetta feels very on her forehand in the canter and combined with the fact that she is fast and near unresponsive to my half-halts, it's close to being out of control. I tried working through it in a variety of ways - just getting into a half-seat and letting her just do her thing, asking for shoulder-in at the canter (BAD IDEA apparently), and finally just half-halting her until she responded and not care about where her head was at (basically in my lap).  Unfortunately she's such a hot, sensitive, anticipatory horse that we can't just school the canter over and over again until she gets over it because it would make it worse, not better.

Only good thing about my day - outfit on point

It was a rough ride and left me feeling a bit discouraged and unsure if I should attempt to show her. Is two weeks enough time to school the canter and get it to a manageable gait?

We've got quite a bit to work on, so just for my sanity, I thought I'd make a list of what we need right now.

Training Level
Canter - reasonable speed, not on forehand, on the bit
Canter-trot transition
Stretchy trot circle

First Level
Fine-tune our leg yield
Lengthened trot and canter

Second Level - obviously this is farther down the road, not in our immediate future!

Travers
Canter-walk transition
Canter loop/counter canter

This is a bit of a downer post, so I'll focus on what is good. Her shoulder-in at the trot is fantastic right now! Her leg yield is also really pretty good, we just need to work on a little more straightness and I need to not block her forward motion. Our trot work is going really well, she's getting a lot better about maintaining speed and not pulling on me. Our trot-halt and trot-walk transitions are really good right now too. Our 10 meter circles (both full circles and the two half-circles) are feeling phenomenal, as are our 15 meter canter circles (when we're not careening around like a baby racehorse).

Random picture from doing morning barn chores

I feel like we're definitely on the right track, but the going has been slow. This is usual for Jetta, she takes a long time to get back to where we were after a break, and I feel like I've approached the "retraining" well. I have a tendency to want to school the "fun" stuff that we've done before, even though she's not necessary ready and it usually results in having to unteach her that move until we're ready for it, since she'll use it as an evasion for what I actually want her to do. Example: if we work on lengthened trot, when we try to go across the diagonal and I don't ask for the lengthened trot, she charges into it, then gets upset when I half-halt her to get her back to a working trot.

We'll keep chugging along, and luckily I still have 12 days to decide on the show. I really want to go, but we'll see if we are actually ready in time!

In other news, I finally replaced her super worn out show bridle

Notice her creeper neighbor

And I got to put this browband on that's been waiting for a bridle!