Memorial Day Parade 2011

The above gorgeous mare is Jordan, owned by Jenny. I rode Jordan three times this past week to prep for the memorial day parade I rode her in this morning, to get to know her better. She's initially very quick; very sensitive and responsive to any sort of leg movement, constantly looking for an excuse to burst forward into a trot. Besides that however, she's surprisingly easy to stop. She's more comfortable outside on a road than she is in the arena, and she seems to have a 10 minute warm-up period, after which she suddenly settles in and settles down. She's responsive both to speeding up and slowing down, within the gait itself as well. At first I wasn't sure if the parade was such a good idea, but she really grew on me this week as I rode her. 

She was excellent during the parade today! She wasn't really phased by anything, not the cars/firetrucks/band/color guard/children/other horses, etc. Only during the last two minutes, when she stopped and pooped, did she suddenly get anxious. It was very sudden and random, but luckily it was the end of the parade so it didn't really matter. She was a pleasure to ride :) 

This picture is from our ride up to our house on Saturday.

Happy Memorial day, and thank you to our veterans and soldiers.

Parade and My Coming Adventures with Daisy-Mae

I did not end up getting better in time to take the lesson on Ladd. Jean took it instead and it went well :)

I rode Bubba in the parade on Sunday and he was absolutely wonderful, again :) Such a handsome boy. I took red, white, and blue duct tape and wrapped it around his boots. You can sort of see it on one of his front's the the picture. What a good boy.

Picture by my Dad. (!!)

I found the picture below on my Mom's computer. It was taken just before I left for the XC schooling in May. I love how sharp Daisy looks :)

And my most exciting current news...I'm going to camp for 5 days with Daisy in August! :D I'm beyond excited. It should be really fun, especially since she gets to go with me. We're going to Forrestel Farm Camp. We'll be there over her birthday, too! :) And we have a pleasure show coming up this Sunday.

Parade and Upcoming Cross Country Schooling

Quick post!

The parade on Bubba yesterday went really really well. Bubba could have had a great career as a police horse. Nothing at all bothered him; he was amazing with everything-noise, people cheering, clapping, balloons, candy flying, motorcycles, bands, firetrucks, etc. We ended in my old Elementary school yard where the trailers had been brought too and it was so cool; all those recess wishes where I wished I had a horse to ride around came true; I got to canter Bubba around the school yard. It was pretty awesome :)

AND TOMORROW! I'm going to a schooling! I'm beyond excited; I didn't think I could go, but I did work ahead of time tonight and I'll be able to go!!! :) It'll be a squeeze with school work, but...it'll be so worth it. You wanna see the jumps I'll be doing? This is the intro course. I didn't do the intro course at the last schooling, but who knows what tomorrow will bring...we'll see. And this is the beginner novice course. That's what I'm expecting we'll do, but again, I'm happy with either :) it should be loads of fun. We get to try our first water crossing, and a bank!
Oliver, Jean's son is coming, and so is Katie from the last schooling, and an old friend of mine Lina. :)
Katie will be trailering Daisy, instead of Jean...which will be a first. Daisy's only been on Jean's two trailers the last three years :P but I'm pretty sure she'll be ok loading. She'll get to 'room' with Allie, Katie's horse. Remember the last schooling?

P.S. you can see Bubba and I clearly in the 3 photo, second dark bay from the left.

Just Gotta Love Her

Some things about Daisy bother me, but...there is a bond between us that cannot be broken. I love that girl so much.
That said, I digress.

Jenny and her three mares moved into the nighborhood, and Daisy and I visited on Monday. Daisy was shocked to see them, and they were shocked to see her. I'm excited for all the things their living so close has brought for us; someone to ride with, ponies for Daisy to visit with, an indoor, etc etc. :)

Today Jean picked up Daisy...two hours late. That's never happened before :P but it turned out ok so that's good...by the time she came it was almost 9:30 and pitch dark out. My brother sat in the bed of his truck waiting for her with me (at the end of the driveway...as usual) and Daisy stuck her nose over, breathing in deep, looking around. I sat on her for a bit in the dark, with just a halter and lead...she was quiet. Same interested, not worried behavior as usual. In the dark...it was cool. What a sweet pony I have. I really do. :) <3 Lovvveee her. So...Mounted meeting with the 4H club Friday, possibly riding Saturday (depending on how energetic she is Friday), pleasure show Sunday, and parade on Bubba Monday. I'm super excited for the show...should be good. I need to do a refresher on side passing over a pole, and then we should be all set. We're showing in a borrowed leopard print pad from Jenny for western ;) with my new brown show shirt (I have 5 western show shirts now. I feel rich ;) and the new bridle. Funnn! English we have a new, stark white pad, and new paddock boots and chaps. Tall boots don't appeal to me...I feel like I don't have enough movement in my heel and leg with them...so I got new black half chaps to save just for shows with my new black paddock boots and those are my "tall boots" :P. That's it for now....my knee has been strangely swollen, again, since Monday...I'm icing it currently. :P These pictures were all taken tonight...I stuck the macro flower shot (of chives) in there for fun; it's pretty cool lookin'.

Headstalls, Lunging, & All That Jazz

Lots of fun stuff goin' on!...Basically.
Sunday I rode the 5.2 block again, but Daisy seemed tired. She picked up a trot and canter when I asked, but she didn't seem into it. So Monday I just went over our trail once, Tuesday it rained, Wednesday I rode Bubba. I rode him western for the first time. Andd...drumroll...I'm riding him in the Memorial Day Parade in our town with our club! And possibly the 4th of July parade as well then. I'm very excited :)
So Wednesday I didn't ride Daisy because I was with Bubba, ended up lunging Daisy on our lawn. Today, I barely rode, due to my exciting fun awesome new western show headstall. :) It arrived today. I got it at Horseloverz.com for just $24.50! I used the curb bit with it...and really like how Daisy rode in it. I know two years ago when I got the curb and used it she rode better in it than the Tom Thumb for awhile, but eventually started ignoring it...I think I'll definitely show western in it this year, and perhaps ride in it outside of shows, too, since I don't really ride western often anyway...it would just require switching out headstalls each time :-/ We'll see. In any case, I love it and can't wait to show in it (along with my new split reins to replace my broken old ones).

Got me some leather cleaning sponges ;) and so I cleaned up my three (!) headstalls today :).

My english one definitely needed it. It's so much more supple now. Western saddle is next on the agenda.

And apples. I know, I know...I'm weird for posting them. I just..felt like it. I keep getting apples from my school lunch when there's nothing else I feel like eating (but I spend money for more~set price) and they're accumulating. My lucky horse ;)

And what else? Jenny moves in this weekend...with her horses. I'm so excited. Once the horses are there, Daisy will be thrilled to head out to her house often, and so will I. It's a great deal.

OH! I lunged Daisy again tonight. I put her english saddle on and used twine to make my own version of side reins. A friend of mine started using side reins on her mare lunging, and ended up switching to twine because she felt it worked better. I don't have side reins, so I'm making do with twine. My friend's mare has improved tremendously, and I'm hoping it will do Daisy some good. I'm thinking, once Jenny gets her arena cleared out and new sand put in, I might leave my lung line and whip up there and "side rein" lunge Daisy when I go up. It's a little hard on our uneven lawn. I'm not sure what to make of it tonight...Daisy seemed bordering on confused and/or/idk uncomfortable...Not sure what to make of it. She came down on the bit, and had a few licking & chewing moments, and did step through a little more with it, but...Idk...she wasn't thrilled. I think she was confused...the more I do it, the more it will click? We'll see.
Sunday the 30th is our first show (since the game show was canceled). It's a pleasure show, and I'm riding all day. With the new headstall and trying out the curb again...I'm feeling a lot better about Western. And I really am physicked to see how Daisy does this year in an english show ring. She's improved tremendously this winter-I hope it shows. Then the 31st is the parade with Bubba.

Until my next post,

Post #193

Hello, all!

I ended up not riding in the parade on Saturday...Considering how Daisy wasn't completely fine with the last parade, my mom and I didn't have good "feelings" about this one, as it would be a much longer, larger parade, so I opted not to ride in it...turned out that it was fun, anyway, and I was glad I was there to help out.

Our club still attended the parade, and it was a good thing! Without us, there would, again, be NO horses! What a shame! :-P

I arrived and promptly started braiding tails with ribbon; I did one pony, and then another club member wanted it, too...then I did 2 or 3 forelocks. I'd just like to say, I LOVE our club; the majority of the members....well, actually, all of them, are younger then me, some a lot younger, but it's so fun that way. I never had younger siblings or younger relatives living near me, so it's kinda fun to hang out with the "little" kids. :)

The parade finally started, after getting everyone mounted on ponies and moved out of the way as our club's three trailers were taken away to the place where the parade would end, to pick us up.

We did a lot of waiting in the beginning because traffic was still going on down one side of the street, so we had some waiting to do to get onto Main street. One of our club members was riding Maggie, a Standardbred that Jean recently rescued. Maggie looks awesome now, and was a former Mennonite buggy horse, so she really shouldn't have been nervous at all, but her rider was a little nervous, so I stood with them for awhile...by the time we got going, Maggie was fine. She's a beautiful girl now....maybe one of these days I"ll so before and after pictures of when Jean got her; she's awesome now!

Once we got going, Scout, the pony I rode in a show in May, started getting a little excited, so I lead him and rider for a little bit...then they went alone again, then he got super excited as we passed by a mini-stage playing music, so Jean and I both held him...it's so...sad and annoying. We passed that stage playing music, and the music was loud and jumpy; no wonder Scout was nervous! I wish they'd have turned it down...

The rest of the parade was uneventful; I saw some friends of mine, and it was fun listening to the crowd "oooh and ahh" over the ponies; two of our ponies, Mouse (far left pony in the middle picture) and Biscuit (last little buckskin pony in the last picture) are small and ADORABLE, and you could people all of the place saying "Oh, look at the horsies! Look at the little ones!" :-). At the end of the parade we passed a McDonalds, and we joked that we should ride through the drive through...maybe if I ride next year, I will :-P.

For those who are interested in the horses, left to right in the middle picture are Mouse, Phoenix, and Mari (Samaria is her full name, I think)...Last picture left to right (that you can see; the three ponies) are Bella, Biscuit, and Scout.

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The GREAT news is, I got a natural trimmer!!!!! I'm SUPER excited! I found the name and number for one "through the grapevine" and made and appointment for yesterday afternoon...it was awesome! (did I already say that?) I'm completely thrilled. If you've read my blog from the beginning, you'll know that since I got Daisy I've had problems with her hooves; bruising, getting cut, her being lame, having to soak her hoof, not riding for a week or two at a time, etc. Last year, I had her shod. To put it plainly, it was horrible. She reared, she wouldn't stand still, she obviously hated it, and though I didn't admit it mostly because I thought there was no choice but to shoe her, I dreaded the farrier coming. I read The Soul of a Horse: Life Lessons from the Herd by Joe Camp (gifted to me by my awesome uncle :)) and was completely convinced. Shoeing is terrible.

What I realized yesterday was that the natural trimming gives the horse's hoof actual shape. Normally, the hoof is trimmed so that it's flat the way it would be if it had a shoe on. That's fine, if there's a shoe (which are bad anyway), but if they're just flat and there's no shoe, the parts of the hoof that are NEVER supposed to touch the ground do and that's what causes the horse to go lame and people to say that the horse needs shoes. I found it completely incredible yesterday to watch and listen to the trimmer as he explained the way the hoof should be shaped, and how many problems he's solved with his natural trimming. Horses that were lamanitic so bad that they would be put down were saved because of his trim. The trimmer studied in Canada with Lisa Huhn for awhile, and he said at the end of his studying he had to dissect 16 horse hooves. He said that it was terrible what he saw; the coffin bone in hooves of horses that had shoes was completely deformed and twisted because the shoes were SO bad.

All I can say is, PLEASE, read up about the natural trimming and try to find a trimmer near you; it's not simply having a horse go 'barefoot'. If you go barefoot but still have a farrier trim their hooves, they are still in pain because the hooves are trimmed wrong. Check it out, it's a fascinating subject, actually.

I mentioned to the trimmer that I have Daisy on Smarthoof, a hoof supplement, and he said right away that the supplement was a waste of time. He explained that there are so many excess ingredients in supplements that it really just makes a horse more anxious than need be, and it ends up not using half of the supplement. He said he switched his horses to just plain rolled oats and black oil sunflower seeds and that the sunflower seeds make the horse's coat shiny and give the hooves all the "supplement" they need, naturally. I'm SO going to try that! He also said that sweet feed, which I feed Daisy, is actually too sugary, and just increases the chance of thrush in a horse. I'm almost disappointed with myself for not having questioned feed and supplements before; it all makes so much sense. Really makes me motivated to question everything. Just because the majority of people do something and don't want to hear otherwise, does not mean that it's right.

Daisy evidently LOVED the trimmer; he patted her and even gave her a hug in the beginning, and was one of the few people to ignore her angry ears in the beginning. She seemed to like him from the start, and was so still and quiet, we barely held the lead; sometimes it felt like we could have dropped it right there on the driveway and she would have stood still. It was awesome.

The natural trimmer is holding a seminar in our area soon, and I'm hoping to go; I'm completely intrigued. Makes me want to go into natural horse care when I'm older! That would be a cool job!

Alrighty, sorry this was so long! Hope it gave you something to think about...

Slideshow

Hello, again! Here are the pictures I *promised*.


The first...30??? or so pictures are from the parade. Then there are 2 pictures from a show that I went to with Jean and Bubba, then some random pictures. I went on an Equine Careers Camp with 4H and we went to a Standard bred breeding farm, a vet clinic, an Arabian training stable, and 2 other farms...so those are pictures. I forgot to include pictures of the show, but my pictures of the show are limited, so I may put some up separate in a little while.

Sorry it's so long.... :)
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By the way, I'm not sure how many of you know, but I have another blog, if you're interested.

http://lifeoutsidethebarn.blogspot.com