Fancy, Fun and not feral

 Funny was the bestest girl today! I fed them and tossed Fleck in with Dan so the girls were in the big field. I went to catch one of them to go ride with Kelli this morning and Lyric started walking off, so... I grabbed Funny. She was happy to go and do and loaded right up. 

We had a nice dressage ride in the arena with Kelli and Marvin. She was pretty calm and very good. Because we were in the dressage arena, we didn't have poles to go over or jumps to go around... we just had to ride. And she stayed mostly chill and balanced and in a good tempo. She occasionally got quick but was listening to my seat aids and half halts. I barely had to half halt for speed today! And it was only after we cantered that I had to. She got all of her correct canter leads today too! She is moving much more politely, especially considering we didn't have any poles or anything. And she was well behaved with sharing the arena with Marvin too. We even played with leg yield a little bit. The biggest issue today was that she doesn't really want to bend around my left leg. She wanted to fall in, throw her left ribs into my left leg, fishtail out to the right, and sometimes overbend at the neck to the left/inside. Kelli suggested riding her with more outside rein connection, which....worked to a degree. I had to pulse it a little and be very soft with it and then even pulse for inside flexion too. But then she said to think about holding her outside shoulder to the inside and riding her straight (via the outside rein) and that made more sense to me. I tried all of it and we got some really nice moments but it's hard. She's definitely tougher to the left. But again, overall, some really big accomplishments today just in general and quite a few lovely moments. Kelli was nice and videod for me!

We didn't ride too terribly long as Kelli had to get home, so Funny and I went for a solo hack. We headed out to the XC field and I figured while we were there, we could pop over some fences. She was super polite and trotted them all and didn't even really offer to canter off for some. I did make her pick up the canter and canter a few. She's still getting the hang of it and perhaps I need to help her out just a little bit to help encourage her to make decisions/changes to get a good distance. But not do it for her all the time... We had fun though. She spooked at some of the bigger fences as she passed them. And it took a minute to get her down the bank into the water, but she did. And she didn't want to do the ditch the first try either. Silly girl! 

So then we hacked to the lake (but avoided it because it was chilly enough and I had my saddle on). We hacked around and then added the little lake loop to get us more trail time! She had fun and so did I. 

Good pony!