Welcome Tillie!

Today Luca's daughter Tillie came to Stoneybrook. Robert bought her and we're going to promote her as much as humanly possible. We're going to train her up and enter her in a lunge line class or two this summer if all goes well. As you can see she's in a bit of an awkward stage right now. She's going to be turned out with Rocky, our traditional babysitter/uncle. He is very good at teaching kids to keep their stall tidy.

I rode Colonel again today. Alyssa sat in the arena and watched us. Colonel seems to like having someone around besides me. He was really very good, I thought. We even cantered around a bit. His left lead canter was very pleasant, calm and slow. I tired my legs out a bit keeping him moving. When we went to the right he picked up the left lead canter, we went around once but he started out pretty hyper and so we had enough calm strides that we quit doing that. It took quite a while trotting around to the right before he calmed down again. Then he got a little homesick and started calling to his buddies. Fortunately we were just about done. He barely noticed when Alyssa left the arena, which was nice. Sometimes he pitches a little fit about that.

He was great on his hand walk outside today. I led him halfway around the field and then turned and walked straight towards the bride to back home and he was totally calm. Just went along sniffing the ground like a dog. One of these days I need to borrow Alyssa's rain boots and take him across the far creek and see how he does.

Alyssa and I messed with Niki (I'll get a picture of her up here) a bit today. Alyssa sat on her for the first time this morning. In the afternoon we worked on lunging her over a jump. She was somewhat resistant to the idea. At first I tried this thing I saw on the RFD channel. The philosophy was basically to let a horse run past a jump if they want and figure eventually they'll be used to it enough to face it and jump it, just keep them going forward until then. Niki just kept getting more and more hyped up so eventually I wound up going back to what had worked for Star. Led her over the pole between the standards, lunged her over the pole, jumped her in hand (She, like Star, seemed nervous about the X so we did a vertical instead) and then goosed her over the jump on the lunge line. We got a few good jumps both ways and then we brought her away from the jump. Having jumped over it she wasn't afraid to go past it anymore, which was nice.

She's an opinionated little darling. I'm glad Alyssa likes her.