Nov Review/Dec Goals

November In Review:

• More trail rides: Completed! We did 4 trail rides and Quest did great. We found a couple of things to work on which will be addressed in next month's goals.  
• Transitions: Completed. Trot-canter-trot, as expected, was no big deal and accomplished quite early in the month. 
• Work on flying lead changes: Nope. Bad weather led to lack of space in the arena to actually do anything safely. We'll shelf this one for later on in the spring.
• No-stirrup November (at least one entire ride stirrup-less): Completed! Not one but 4 rides, 3 of them being bareback in fact.
• Start trimming: Completed. I'm trimming every other week to start, so that was twice this month. Since I'm still learning, I take off less than a professional trimmer so the shorter frequency works out well so far. I'm starting to get more comfortable handling the rasp and working with a hoof stand. I'll take some pictures and do a hoof post sometime.

December Goals:
Anticipating colder weather and limited arena space to work with, a lot of this month's goals are smaller in "scale" but still important.

• Handwalking trails- Weather pending. We've done two solo handwalks on the trail so far and I'm seeing a ton of improvement already. I got some great feedback on how to address Quest's pushy behavior and I tried out one method which seems to be working really well for her so far. I'll detail it in a later post sometime. 
• Trotting in hand- Quest actually had no idea how to do this when we started out and seemed totally confused at first. Since this just might be pretty important skill for a future endurance horse, so why not learn. Plus it's handy when I get cold and need to jog to warm up. I only started working on this last week and mareface has caught on fast and we can trot straight lines and circles though I want it consistent. And if the footing allows, we're going to do it on the trail too.
• Neck reining: Another future endurance horse-skill thing that would be handy to have I have found myself really wanting to ride one-handed too. 
• Ground pole work: I secretly (not so secretly now) want to cross train Quest to do some jumping. Not knowing her history with it, we're going to start with basic patterns from the 101 Jumping Exercises book.