Ava And Coyote
I set up an obstacle course for the kids following a pattern shamelessly borrowed from this blog. Looking at it now I see that I didn’t get it exactly right, Oh well, I’ll rearrange a little. Without trying it myself I then sent the kids off to try it. In the blog she said it was hard. I didn’t doubt her, I just didn’t worry about it. They managed it. Or Ava did. My daughter wanted to ride bareback and, while she does a pretty good job staying on, I didn’t want to test it while she also tried to steer. I held onto her lead rope and led her around it.
The next day I got a chance to ride Rusty. We tried out our ground poles. It was hard! Trotting
in a line down them was more than my green little horse could manage. Serpentining around them pushed his limits. But what fun, I’m leaving it up for a little while and we are going to keep practicing.
After this and our little cross rail they were jumping, my daughter is determined to jump things now and was so thrilled when her mare hopped over one of the poles, I am searching for more fun game ideas to keep them interested. I put out queries on the Internets and got some really good ideas. The one most offered was Simon says, followed by a list of others from egg and spoon to dollar bareback and even jousting. I’m going to have to find some targets, that one sounded really fun. Does anyone have more ideas? I would love to hear what people do to make learning fun and keep kids wanting to ride.
I’ll leave you with a video of Ava rocking the pattern and Coyote being a saint. He used to hate kids, like violently fearful. It’s amazing how well he is taking being a lesson horse.
