SNO and a Shetland

Stayed to watch the SNO's lesson this week as she was feeling hard done by. Usually I drop her off and take Ali to the other stables and stay and watch Ali, since it's a 25km round trip to go from one place to the other. But this week I organised it so Ali had her lesson on another day so we could take some pics of Little Miss Showoff......

She really enjoyed her lesson

...indulged in some unauthorised overtaking.....

...and managed not to fall off at canter (love the concentration on her face!)

I suspect the poor ponies enjoyed it rather less, there was much kicking and pulling going on and some of the kids had even been armed with crops. Had to resist the urge to drag some of the little beasts off the ponies' backs and give them a stern talking to. Which is why I prefer not to watch really. But it's the least worst stables round here (where Ali goes they don't take beginners) and her friends from school go, so she is happy.

 

Will just have to explain to her that if she kicks one of mine like they kick those ponies, she won't stop til the next county......!

A somewhat soggy holiday.....

Haven't been around for a couple of weeks as we've been on our annual holiday to the UK. This time we went to Anglesey where wifi apparently hasn't yet been invented......

Stayed in a great holiday cottage near Beaumaris, discovered a great little ruined castle just up the road and a moody windswept beach down the road, yomped the kids around both!

We did the usual tourist stuff, including yomping small children up Snowdon (they were unimpressed)

....although we had to give up and turn back 2kms from the summit due to rather a lot of weather arriving, horizontal sleet, fog etc......Mike had already run up to the top though - and said you couldn't see a damn thing up there when we met him on his was back down!

Rather stunning countryside up there - the bits we could see, anyway.......

Of course we also went riding, a fun ride to the beach where we did some great canters, I managed to get a few shots before the rain arrived and forced me to put the camera away

Map and more photos of that ride here.

Great scenery in Wales, horses everywhere on Anglesey, could be a cool place to live if you were waterproof ;-) The sun did put in an appearance occasionally though, like the day we arrived and the day we left......

The SNO is very determined......

Since I have been cycling a lot more this past week for the 5x50 Challenge than I usually do (like at all), Éowyn has decided she wants to do some too. Only slight problem was that she couldn't ride her little bike without stabilisers......

So a couple of days ago, she pestered her dad to help her.

....and last night, she got it!

So this morning she was up at 6 asking when we could go cycling........I thought it might be prudent to wait until the sun came up, but as soon as it got light, off we went. Not the fastest bike ride in the world, lots of wobbly bits as she's not too hot on steering, but she only ended up in the ditch twice, so not bad for a first effort ;-)

She managed a whole 4 kms too :-)

Fun in the sun.......

Have had a great day with the ponies and the kids today, Hollie and Polo came to join us and we've been doing some practising.

Started off with a practise of the HT youngsters challenge (full details here), they soon realised that the egg and spoon bit isn't as easy as it looks, neither is one handed riding!

Some more work to be done there.......

Then we moved on to polework, and transitions, gave them something else to think about......

and we finished up the morning session with a bit of jumping the scarey black plastic draped over the pole!

Neither of them was too keen on this at the start, here's some video:

After lunch we went for a little hack, guess who had to walk? Yep, that'd be me as the SNO insisted on riding too......

Sky was full of beans and danced about a bit, especially when the other two went off for a hooley, and the SNO thought this was all great fun! She even did a big spook when the others came back.......and Éowyn laughed. And told her off........

She was grinning the whole time.

I've lost my ride....

The SNO declared that she didn't want to ride up front of me today (and it hurts my back at the moment to have her there) so guess who got to walk?

And not just walk, oh no, "mummy can we trot?" started as soon as we'd left the drive.......

After the first attempt, when she nearly ran down an unfortunate passerby (and his dog!) I had to do a fair bit of running alongside her to be ready with the brakes.......

....and when her sister wanted to jump a ditch, yes you guessed it, we had to do that too

I need a sit down now!!!

Riding lessons....

Continuing the quest to find a decent place for the girls to have lessons here that is less than an hour's drive away, we tried a new riding school today, run by an English friend of a friend.

Very small, only 10 or so horses, no sand school, nothing clever, but run by a BHSAI called Louise who is very nice, teaches well and has endless patience for the SNO "Can I trot now, can I, can I?"

Ali rode a nice big horse called, erm, Angey (?), bit bigger than she's used to!

But she enjoyed her lesson on him

Then it was Éowyn's turn riding Mickey. Right from the start she kept saying " Can I trot now?". Louise was very patient with her.....but eventually she did get to trot and she laughed a lot.....

So I have signed them up for a term's lessons, very reasonable prices too, their website is here.

Busy day

The trimmer came for his second visit today. He says all of their feet have improved, Ches and Kinna's are particularly good, and an 8 week interval is fine for them all as they do so much exercise. People have tried to tell me that unshod horses can't do lots of roadwork as their feet will wear away, but Chester and Gandalf have shown otherwise!!! Sky's feet still have some flares but they are growing out, her feet look totally different since she's been having a barefoot trim rather than a farrier's pasture trim.....

 Ali got out of school an hour early so we took Gandalf and Sky for a walk. G can't be saddled at the moment because of his lump (which is getting smaller) so Ali hopped on bareback.

We went past the garden with the noisy Alsatian behind a plastic covered fence (it's the noise it makes jumping on the fence that bothers them, not the dog itself) and stopped to let them graze and get used to the wretched animal, as it's on one of my nice hack routes. Next thing I know, the dog's owner has come out and after calling it to totally ineffectually, had a go at us for winding his dog up!!! I got the chance to trot out some choice rude French words.........

Anyway, I achieved my objective, which is to get Sky not to jump when the dog jumps on the plastic. Mind you, the first time it did that, it made me jump too!!

After that we went to fetch Éowyn from school, horses totally unfazed by lots of screaming kids, not really a surprise considering they live with Éowyn really......

...and of course, she insisted on a lift home!

A lively ride!

Rode Gandalf and Fina down to Tanya's today as they'll be staying with her whilst we're away. Had to take the Small Naughty One with us, and she wanted to do everything that Ali did.....

Cantering......

....jumping ditches

but she did draw the line at jumping the log on the TREC course from the other week. Fina tackled it somewhat faster than Ali was expecting, hence the expression!!

Love 'em!

Cowgirl Ali

As Ali didn't want Kinna to be left out, we did her photo for the calendar yesterday.

She was very good, didn't mind the (rather heavy) Western saddle at all. I even dug out an old hackamore bridle to finish the look.

Kinna looked very small under all that....

Inevitably, Éowyn wanted a ride......

So that's both babies backed then, what shall we do next?

Spotty Indian Pony

Éowyn's turn for the calendar shoot today, thought Sky would look the part as an Indian pony. So she's an unbacked two year old, but that didn't matter!

Sky was better behaved than the child, unsurprisingly.......

Éowyn's first dressage test

Last month there was a lead rein class in the Interdressage schedule and as Éowyn has been going on about getting rosettes like her sister for ages now, we decided to go for it. I was going to plonk her on Gandalf, but Tess offered us the use of Coquinette, so she went for it......

And she didn't even come last, scoring 60.24% put her 5th out of 7. Which luckily for me meant she got a rosette.....

....although she was a bit disappointed that it wasn't pink!

We have handy horses....

Had a bit of fun today practising for the Handy Horse class in this month's Interdressage competition. We had a load of plastic for them to walk over

a little maze

An arch with streamers

and best fun of all, jousting for a ring!!

Even Éowyn had to have a go at that.....