Finally! I am so excited to have been teaching in short sleeves this evening. It is a most welcome change! We have had quite a bit going on this past month and even more planned for the coming months.
In the last month or so we got in three new horses to add to the lesson roster. Bouy, King and Buddy.
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Bouy is an 18 year old gray, large pony who came from an old friend of mine. He did 4H with her back when I was in 4H in my teens. He is a great jumper and is super athletic with quite the personality. Alyssa S. will be partial leasing him for the year and I know she is super excited already! She will use him as her 4h project, do some local hunter shows as well as get her feet wet in the eventing world with us. Their first show together will be Blue Goose in April, they will tackle the Intro CT division. (Intro Dressage and 18" jump course.)
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King and Buddy came to us together from a family farm where they were the only horses. King is a 14 year old QH gelding who is about 16 hands and Buddy is a 27 year old Appaloosa Gelding, about the same height as King. Both of them have spent a lot of years trail riding and were even camp horses quite a few years back. King is already being used for some of our beginner and novice riders and has been great. He is a super slow, couch of a ride! If you happen to meet him you'll notice he is QUITE over weight. We are working on getting him in to better shape and then hope to teach him about jumping some cross rails :) Buddy is still settling in. As a much older horse he has had a tough time making the transition to a new farm this late in life. He is great to ride and has a teeny tiny canter (its even smaller/smoother then Nikki's fabulous canter!) We hope in the next weeks he will settle in to life with us just as King has.
In other news--
*Rosie is back at it doing walk/trot lessons again! We are so excited that she is back under saddle again after almost 5 months of rest and rehab due to the deep flexor tendon tear that she had. She is one of the sweetest ponies you could ever hope to meet!
*Bryanna Y. will be partial leasing Willow for the 4H season and hopes to participate in all kinds of things from 4h to the local schooling shows and some eventing type things too! Willow came to us last May as a freshly off the track 4 yr old TB who had had one ride since retiring from racing. We now have her successfully WTC and jumping a 2'3 course with pretty consistent changes. The hope is that she moves up to the 2'6-2'9 range this year with Bry. One step at a time! She is a great mare and we are really looking forward to seeing how she and Bry do this year as a team.
* Our favorite big man on campus, Remington, moved home to the Reid's beautiful new farm this week. We will miss seeing his big head hanging over in to the aisle way every morning! Julie plans to trailer over for lessons come May. We'll miss seeing them around the farm all the time for sure! We have a number of horses moving back to the farm this week after being away for the Winter-- we will be looking at a full house by Saturday!
* I moved Mikey back to KL a few weeks ago. He had a very leisurely Winter hanging out at the farm near my house. I think I was only on him about 6 times from November through mid March! He got clipped and is now back to work!
Our first show for the year will be the Combined Test at Blue Goose Stables on April 19. Alyssa, Bry, Anya (and possibly Nancy) all plan to go and do either Intro test A or C. I will be showing Mikey as well in the Training CT division as a warm up for Plantation Field Training level, in May. We had planned to go in April but I just didn't feel that we would have enough time to get fit for it due to all of the bad weather.
We are still doing some planning as far as our first Hunter show goes--stay tuned!
