Silly beast. :)

Gave Bonzo a day off yesterday after her hard weekend, then thought I would do a little bit of sensible jumping today after all that charging about at xc! We had another go with the dutch gag instead of the snaffle today as well. It seems to help with her leaning on me, so we'll probably stick with it for a while.

So anywho, she was a bit skittish to begin with when we got in the arena because it was a bit windy, but she got over that pretty quickly. She did a badassly good canter-walk-canter transition too, so I was a happy Phoebe. :)

But our jumping was a bit interesting! I set up a bounce to an oxer, making the stride between a proper horse stride instead of a Bonnie stride. She didn't really seem to be thinking forward enough today to make the stride, so she did her lovely stop-and-duck to the side thing a few times and a HUGEEE leap from ages out one time, leaving me nicely left behind, eheh. She nearly had me off at one point, it was quite amusing really. All the humour will probably appear on my youtube in a couple of days!

So yeah, I figured I would get rid of the bounce at the beginning, and moved the oxer in a wee bit seeing as she was having difficulty making the stride. That solved the issue and she popped through the double nicely a couple of times. Just goes to show how evil I am for trying to push her out of her pony stride comfort zone. :)

Ah well, beastie won't have to put up with me tomorrow as I'm on a school trip to Cambridge. A day of classics lectures, what fun. But I'm sure she'll enjoy the extra time out in the field engorging herself!


Happy Bonnie doing what she does best! :)

Brent Pelham Hunter Trial... etc. :)

Yesterday (Saturday 27th) Annabel and I took the two podgy mares to the hunter trial at Brent Pelham. Bonnie hadn't done any competitive cross country in about a year (or... come to think of it, competed at all in ages!), so I was just taking her with the aim of having a laugh and getting around in one piece.


Mayfly Ginger and Annabel Shaw... and a bit of Bonnie.
We did a bit crud in the pairs, we accidentally missed a fence, Bonnie and I had a couple of runouts, and then we failed to do one of the dressing fences properly because marey had a moment at the photographer. :) But! My lovely little mare was awesome in the novice individuals! We went clear, managing to keep up a good pace throughout, and ended up placing 3rd. The only slight blip we had was when we had to go through a gateway which had *shock horror* a bale of straw leaning next to it. Bonnie thought that would serve as a good excuse to snort and spin for home, but luckily as it wasn't at a fence it didn't count as any penalties.

So I am a very proud Phoebe! It might only have been a tiny little hunter trial, but it's definitely a step in the right direction for the both of us. I just need to keep getting her out and about, to get her to realise that actually, the world isn't that scary a place.


Bonita Spring and Phoebe Kitscha
So after all her hard work yesterday, we just went for a nice, quiet little hack. Well at least, that was my intention. Bonnie had better ideas though, and decided to jump the river crossing from a standstill and take off at a gallop. :) So much for being tired! When we got back, I had a bit of time to kill before getting picked up so we did some trick practice, seeing as we haven't done that in a while. Bonnie was more than happy to waggle her forelegs at me for polos, and did a nice little bow. Bless my little marey.

And so it begins...

Welcome to Bonnie's blog. :)

I figured this would be a good way to keep everyone updated on how the marey-moo is doing, and also for me to look back over our progress. So I hope you enjoy!