All The Kings' Horses

 I'm going to wrap up another week all at once: Monday August 4th: I worked with Gia lightly on some dressage.  This was her first day back since her injury.  She only had a week off, which isn't enough time for muscle to start to atrophy, but I wouldn't want to come back hard after a week off, so I don't make my horses come back hard either.  We worked at the halt, walk and a light trot.  I mainly had her focus on flexions at those gaits, lifting her poll, and transitions.  It was a nice reminder of the basics. Tuesday August 5th: We had a lesson with Suzin, where we still kept things fairly light, comparatively speaking. 😊 We mainly worked at the walk and trot.  Suzin had us working on our steadiness at both gaits.  It is very painstaking work, at least on my part (and probably on Gia's).  There are a million things that can fall apart, and they all tend to do so at the same time, but I have to keep them all together at the same time in or...

 So obviously, I am way behind.  I have had way too much going on in way too many directions lately, but I have finally found a minute to catch up on Gia's blog.  So, you get two weeks all in one! Tuesday July 22 We worked on dressage at the halt, walk and trot.  I asked her to do a bit of flexions to loosen her up.  Then we moved into transitions between all the gaits, while also keeping up with the flexions.  Finally, we worked on several different basic dressage figures, focusing on straightness and bending.   Wednesday July 23 I warmed Gia up with transitions, flexions and lifting the poll at the walk and trot.  Then we started to play over a few jumps in the arena.  The highest we got was up to about 2'3", with some interesting fillers.  She doesn't seem to mind what I have been putting under the jumps to fill in the space - barrels, flowers, jump blocks, etc.  I worked with her on being very straight towards the jumps, as...