Saturday MIL and I decided to go ride. We were going to ride on the road as the weather was decent but it started getting cooler so we decided to head over to Mona's. I was going to take both Lu and Cat but since we planned on going to the sale later that night, I decided I only had time to take one. So I picked Cat.
Lucy was kind of funny. She was looking at me like "hey, what's going on? why aren't you taking me?" while I loaded Cat in the trailer. Cat loaded like a charm and off we went.
When we arrived at Mona's, a boarder was using the arena so we put Cat and Sis in a stall and chatted with Mona for a bit. Once it was time, we cleaned up and saddled up. I realized that Cat hadn't had a saddle on her since June of last year (our road ride) and that I hadn't ridden her since our bb ride in October. I approached w/caution but she took it like she'd been saddled just the day prior. I only had one problem, the girth needed to be let out a notch!
I headed to the arena and did some desensitizing and LFR with her prior to getting on. She was doing some awesome rollbacks in her LFR Stage 2. I'd say they were almost as good as Lucy's. Once I felt she was going to be fine I decided to mount up. I had brought in my bridle but decided to just use my halter instead and do some one rein riding similar to the videos below.
After doing a handful of ORS at the walk/trot I decided to move onto the passenger lesson as she was starting to anticipate my stops. I did a few ORS at the canter to make sure she wasn't going to hump up. I felt comfortable she was going to be just fine so we continued to canter around. This is NOT her favorite exercise. She is very lazy and she doesn't like to maintain the canter so I had to squeeze, cluck and spank a few times. She did kick her back legs up once when I spanked her but nothing too big.
One thing I noticed about her is that she is very curious. Mona has several "spooky" objects in her arena and instead of spooking, Cat went to them to investigate. I think I'm going to like that! It feels so weird riding her. She is so much wider then Lucy and her strides are so different. MIL and I joked around as I told her I could not be a monogamous horse owner. I love the different qualities that both Lu and Cat have.
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