More Colors

We’ve gotten to work a couple of times on our colors. Rusty is good but not great at choosing the right color when asked. He is getting very good at matching his colors though!

I had a blue tub and a blue ball. I had been trying to get a yellow ball and I had yellow spray paint. A yellow ball was hard to find though. My husband called from the store and said they had a red ball? I remembered a red tub sitting out in the yard and said to grab it!

We haven’t worked on red at all but the point isn’t to know the color. The point is to match pairs of the same. We could always try it and see what happened!

This is our first go with two colors. Our second or third time of trying to match the colors at all. I think he’s getting the idea!
Of course I didn’t have a camera going for most of it. I thought about grabbing one then decided that we didn’t need to record EVERY  time we worked. So Harvey came over to see what was going on and started dropping a ball in a tub too! He’s never managed that before, and we have tried. A long time ago.
Goes to show the power of observation and of giving things more time. Sometimes things just need more time.

Next time I’ll try to get video of Harvey too.

 



Riding A Ghost

Ghost is learning to line up to a mounting block (fence 😉 ) and has had weight on her back for the first time!
There is no rush to actually get on. The more time we can spend hanging out here at the fence, giving lots of scratches so she wants me up there, the better.
Before any actual riding happens we’re going to have to figure out things like steering and whoa.

Ghost

Ghost has been learning to tell her colors. Just like the horses do. Apparently they both see blue and yellow which is handy, since I have things in those colors.

From her first lesson with one color, to her third? lesson, adding blue in, she’s come a long ways. I can’t wait to see what else she can do.

 


Rusty Roping

This was a fun quick little video we made. Just messing around really. Simple and easy.

I put it on the facebook page and it has over a thousand shares two days later.

I can never believe the ones that go crazy and the ones I work so hard at and no one cares. I wasn’t going to do it because it was cloudy out. Then the gopro quit because the sd card was full so I switched to the phone.

We were actually working on sitting and just took a quick break.


Tricks

Why bother teaching a bunch of ‘silly tricks’?

Isn’t it more important to teach the important thing? Shouldn’t our horses know how to lead, to ride, things that matter before or instead of pointless things like tricks?

I think that is completely the wrong way of looking at things.

Tricks are the foundation of all those other things. Tricks teach a horse to learn. Tricks teach a horse to be fearless, curious, to seek out new things. Trick training teaches all those other things almost by accident. The serious learning is accomplished in a way that is fun for all involved as goals are reached that we think are frivolous.

This little trick has taught both horse and rider to over come insecurities, to work together, balance and trust. Soon it will be flawless and smooth. Together they will learn to be a team. Steering is nothing compared to that.


Standing Quietly

A little bit of nothingness.
Nothing is important. We all should be spending more time doing exactly nothing.
Most of the time we spend with horses we are asking them to do something for us or with us or doing things to them.
When we ask them to do nothing it is different. Doing nothing is hard.
Rusty likes to follow me. He wants to keep playing. He likes to be in the middle of the action. Standing and doing nothing is not what comes naturally to him.
I had to run to the house for new toys for us to do something with. He stood patiently, waiting, and doing nothing so well.

A New Wagon

Rusty has progressed to pulling the kids wagon. It works alright. Sufficiently noisy to get him used to almost anything back there. Heavy enough that he can learn to pull a bit of weight.

It was a gift when our daughter was born more than eight years ago though. Beautiful at first it has aged with hard use. And that one time I ran it over with the car. Oops.

Besides, it would be nice to have something I could eventually ride in. I’m considerably bigger than the wagon.

So I mentioned to my husband that I would like a little cart if he knew of anything around that might work. We farm so nothing ever get thrown away. People seem to think that the current generation has invented recycling. They have never looked at the fence rows on farms. Nothing is thrown out, anything that might possibly be reused is carefully saved and used for parts, repairs, new and interesting inventions.

There was one axle and wheels he thought might be good. And they would have been, If I had a team and or heavier harness.

With nothing showing up immediately he decided instead to repair the wagon so it would drive better. The puncture vine around here is nasty stuff and had long since destroyed the inflatable wheels. We were running on flats and one completely blown apart tire.

My husband took the wagon to the shop, pulled off the old wheels and gathered some old wheels off a planter to replace them with. Much wider, heavier, and not going to go flat.

I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet but the kids have taken it and are having a blast ‘driving’ each other around pulling it.

I can’t wait to hitch it up and fully appreciate my awesome husband who does his best to make sure I have everything I could ever need or want and goes about it without my even asking.


A Little Backwards

We seem to have a new preferred riding style around here right now.

Not sure why. It’s apparently more fun  this way. For the Goblin Child. 8 always wants to do anything she does.

It had rained a little and the horses had a good roll so they were filthy. They both reached everything they could from the ground and were sick of getting the dirt blowing in there faces. So they wanted on to reach the top parts.

Then they turned back around and we went for a nice little ride.  In the howling wind. What great horses not to kill anyone through all this.

 


Driving Horse

We got snow a couple of weeks ago. Lots of snow. Enough snow that I decided it was time to get the harness out and work on driving again.
Apparently this is a winter time activity. There was not a drop of desire to drive all summer. Snow and I can’t stand not to be driving.
We have a routine as I try to help Rusty figure out what I’m asking. We walk down to the end of the driveway where Rusty gets rewarded for making it that far by sharing the feed for the cattle if there’s snow or grazing if there’s grass. Then back.
At first I lead him large parts of the way out. Going home he knows where we’re going and happily leads the way. Now he understands what I mean when I ask him to walk up and is getting pretty good at the whole thing.
Because I don’t have anything to pull with my pseudo driving horse we’ve hitched up to the kids well worn wagon and are driving that around. For the first time today we had a passenger.
He sat back their happily eating Halloween candy while ordering me to stop and go as he desired. Maybe before too long I’ll be able to sit in the wagon and drive…