5-6 years

In May, Sky turned 5. She's strong and physically quite balanced now and has grown to 15.2hh. This year is really about variety in her work, to explore what we both find fun and interesting, and cross train her body so she's a good all around riding horse, both in her skills and her attitude. She's not particuarly forward going (unless she's heading for home!) so this mentality is something we are working with. I want to enhance her motivation, and also improve her responsiveness. We're fine tuning aids for lightness to be our goal. Building cues from energy, lifting the diaphragm and moving up from there as needed. 

In our cross training and explorations so far since her birthday, we've done farm rides, a low level jumping class, a 16 km pleasure ride, le Trec, and have cowboy camp later in the summer. I incorporate obstacles, the garrocha, dressage tests, hacking and travelling to new places into our regular work. We can hack solo and in company, she is very handy with gates, and is steady minded, so we've even done some babysitting for friends on their youngsters. She can work in the snaffle bit and the bosal. Much more refining is still to come, but we continue to progress in the non linear way in which this happens.