Photos With Me In Them, Finally! :)

My boyfriend, Matt, trying to figure out how to ask Aspen to put her foot in the tire.

Aspen following Matt after the little tire experiment.

Here are a few of the photos I took yesterday.  Aspen was great to play with!  I feel like I keep saying the same things over and over but she's just offering so much more every time we're together!  She's keen to put her feet on things now - if she doesn't know what I want or wants to impress me she'll try and put her foot on it!  Aspen was determined to stand on the barrel yesterday, which of course, kept rolling away as she tried.  So she followed it around with her foot in the air trying to get it on there.  Too adorable! :)

I wasn't really playing with her at Liberty but she was loose in the arena and started walking away from me, I put a tiny bit of pressure on her from behind and she trotted off, spun around, and came galloping to me.  I dodged to the left, then to the right, and she began cutting back and forth with me all the while tossing her head and rearing up in the air.  She looked so beautiful with her mane flying up in the wind, her neck arched, and muscles flexing.  Wow! :)

Played a little with Z4 Driving, needs some work as she gets a little worried and tries to escape.  Z3-5 causes her to either be defensive or worried...

Had some good canter to trot transitions On-Line, good changes of direction, and a playful Figure-8!

Here are some more pictures from yesterday, enjoy!

Take The Time It Takes...

...SO IT TAKES LESS TIME! :)  Theme of the day today.  Had another wonderful no-dust session with Aspy.  She's such a clever girl - she is showing that side of herself more and more to me by trying to guess what I want and offer things like change of direction, drawing in, touching things with her nose, and trying to put her feet on EVERYTHING! :)  I have a water bin turned upside down that works great for  mounting or using to hold up one end of my jump since I don't have any standards.  I'd say the bin is about 2'6" high and she tried to get her front foot on it today while I wasn't paying attention.  I turned around to her pawing and trying to lift her hoof higher and higher to reach the top, all the while looking at the bin then back at me.  :)  I had to ask her to stop though because it's much too slippery to stand on. 

It took half the time to mount today which means that I did something right yesterday! I think offering her a Winnie's Cookie really helped make it a positive experience too.  As I stood on my water bin rubbing her and playing some Friendly game with her she started doing a lot of blinking and yawning again.  Great to see her release all that tension, but sad she has it to begin with :(  Hopefully she will continue to get more confident and relaxed with the idea of me on top of her.  

I decided to do another Horsenality chart on her because I feel like she's making some bigger changes and revealing to me more and more of who she really is.  I think she's going to turn out to be on the cusp of LBE/RBE, tending toward RBE in new environments or under pressure.  But when she's confident she's very engaging and is getting more playful by the day.  Yay!

I feel like I could have added more dots because sometimes she can be calm and tolerant, but not consistently.  Sometimes she's tense or mouthy but not regularly.  So I just chose the behaviors I see most regularly in her up to this point.  If you compare to any of my past charts I think this one looks a lot different.  Either my eyes are opening more to who she is and I was misreading her a bit or her Horsenality is evolving as she grows in the Parelli program...