Finally, for your viewing pleasure (and for mine, except for blinking eyes, the heels that aren’t down, and the poor hand position) … Ace under saddle! Ben (my hubby!) and Dave took lots of pictures for me, but unfortunately they didn’t come out all that well. It’s soooo hard to get a horse moving at [...]

Four years ago I had never heard of “natural horsemanship.” I hadn’t heard of Pat Parelli or Clinton Anderson or John Lyons. I’d never seen a rope halter and other than basic leading, grooming, bathing, and trailering etiquette, I didn’t know much about groundwork either. But I did know a lot of horses. Horses had [...]

I’m a firm believer that the greatest riding instructor you’ll ever have is your horse. Things Ace has taught me over the last week: he doesn’t like to feel pressured he doesn’t like it when my upper body gets too forward. He stops if I get in front of the vertical. I can’t ask him [...]

This has been an interesting week for Ace and me. After two months, I think the honeymoon is finally over. I still love him to death, and he’s still a great horse. But I am starting to see some recurring issues, which really just means that I am getting to know my horse better and [...]

I keep flopping back and forth between feeling like I’ve got a solid plan for training Ace and feeling like I’m totally whinging it. But when I stop to think, it’s both. I planned to spend as long as necessary focusing on groundwork until I saw signs that Ace and I were developing a good [...]

It’s been a horse-filled week, and I haven’t had much time to blog about my continuing adventures with Ace this week. I also spent a day at Quarter Horse Congress, mostly checking out vendors — which is exceedingly more dangerous now that I’m a horse owner. Training Update This week was the first that I [...]

Ace looked a little shell-shocked last night after our session. I suppose he thought it was going to be all fun and (ground) games. So our first free-lunging workout came as a little bit of a shock to his system. I’ve been planning to start free-lunging for a while now, and finally got underway last [...]