All growed up....

Cos we went proper XC schooling!

Aim was to pop a few littlies and test him on his own through a few waters.

Well we had a bit of a hack to the first schooling field, where all but one jump were too big for us (best thing about babies, being able to say, no that's too big!!). But it had a huge LAKE as a water. It had no entrance or exit though, and when I first approached it he did his 'no way am I going in THAT' routine. Which has calmed significantly and now consists of him standing looking petulant rather than spinning and doing a runner - huge improvement I'd say!!

So we stood looking at it a bit.... then when I thought he was bored of looking at it, I asked him forward and he hesitantly stepped in and we walked along the shallows (it was pretty deep!).

Then we went and played with a baby roll top and then came back and splashed straight through the water a few times.

He is definately a softly softly horse. Give him time to think things through and as long as he doesn't get tense he will work it out and go my way in the end. The tricky thing is not getting to tension in the first place.... so confrontations are out the window!!

Then we hacked down to a baby-hoss field with lots of little fences. Jumped roll top, logs, tyres, blue piping, little teeny flower bed. Nothing fazes him in terms of looks, but if its narrow he gets tense and tries to run past it, and the tyres he was just a loon, hurdling each time. Suspect they had tyres when they taught him to hurdle. It was the only fence that he just launched at like a loon.

After a few near misses (me nearly out side door as he jumped sideways!) I decided safest option was to come in from trot, then allow him to canter to the fence with me with one hand firmly imbedded in his mane! Sometimes he'd charge the fence and try to jump out the side, but once I had my hand in his mane he was sweet to everything.... think it might be a contact on last stride thing as sometimes he sticks head right up and then cat leaps and everything goes a bit pete tong.

The jump is definately there, but he did get very tense again. I will keep going with softly softly 'fun' jumpies all summer and then decide if it really ISN'T for him.... but I think he will get there but its just a bigger version of the trust issue. And because he's done *some* before, it makes it harder as he remembers the galloping, so when he gets stressed he wants to run past things whereas I want him to learn that slow is easy....

Very pleased as it was the first time he's had to jump with other horses all charging around doing their own thing and he was really focussed on us. Plus we did two very different waters and the second one he walked straight in. Plus he saw lots of different fences and we were able to link 4 or 5 together.

Whether I do the jumping tomorrow remains to be seen. We'll go, do the stressage, then wlak jumpies bits and if they look do-able for a Dan then we'll try, and if they don't I'll withdraw. I don't want to stress him out, I want him to enjoy it. But I'm thinking that having done some once (yest) he might just be perfectly fine tomorrow.

All morning times, so will report back later....