Trying to transition from wanna be ...

... to the "real thing"! Super excited to be just one beautiful day away from our first xc outing since Dec 5th:) Looking forward to seeing my gal pals Marisa and Nicole; I need some friend time! Hoping I can get a little bit of Nicole's bravery and get Muffin over the bench jump. I will hop over the dreaded wide ditch several times ... HATE that thing! But maybe if I can finally get over my dislike of it, Tiki will too. One can always hope:)

Did a little dressage school yesterday and ended up schooling some lead changes. His first one was a.m.a.z.i.n.g. I think he surprised himself by how good it was! Kept going, and ended up popping off somewhere around 6 changes. They were *good*, but he DID get fast and try to run through them. Finished up by doing a pair of simple changes through a walk and a big pat on the neck. For the work before I did the changes, I kept him pretty much on a 20 m circle. Worked on transitioning from a SLOW sitting trot to the canter. He was NOT too happy about that, and did try and get heavy on me, but I kept at it until he relaxed and got happier:)

I seriously need a chiro adjustment, so today I swallowed down 800 mg of ibuprofen and worked on some "being seen in public" grooming necessities;) Clipped his ears with scissors, trimmed his mane, clipped his bridle path, clipped his whiskers, cleaned up the underside of his jaw, trimmed the fetlock feathers, and tried my hand at "eventerizing" his tail. I banged it ... then banged it some more. I then took the clippers to the sides of his tail until the clippers were so bogged down with hair they basically quit on me. I will NOT pull his tail; but I WILL mess with the clip thing until I get it right. I think I made a good start today, and will continue to work on it this week.

It's going to be a spectacular weekend!