Cascara's first Canter

I've been riding Cascara for I guess about a month now. It's been an on - off thing because of holidays like Easter in between (1 1/2 weeks off) and days that I couldn't make it like when we went to pick up Bella. But I think the off times more often than less really did her well. Afterwards she's always really good at everything we learned before the time off. Not that she isn't a very quick study anyway, but it just seems like she always uses the off time to think things over and than present them like she has never been doing anything else, whenever we start back up again.

There's only one thing I hadn't had the guts to do yet all on my own: CANTER

When I first started cantering Cascara at the longe line, without a rider or anything else, she acted like she had never ever done it before getting her legs all tangled up and then getting really mad about it and exploding into all sorts of directions at once. With time she got better and better at it. And by now she's really good. Most of the time she gets the right lead and even if she doesn't she calmly corrects herself without throwing a hug fit. The only thing left is that she still likes to take of bucking if she finds a reason to, like another horse knocking his feed against the wall of his stall...

So up until now I haven't dared to canter her in the saddle without any help from somebody else and since there hadn't been anybody to help me I hadn't cantered her while riding at all.

Yesterday, when Nikola came to the barn with me I finally had the chance to do so. Cascara was so relaxed, that I even passed on having Nikola hook us up to the longe line. The only thing she had to do was help out a little bit with the long whip to get us going, since Cascara obviously didn't yet know what I wanted her to do. I'm so happy with my little girl! Here's a video of our first canter:

our first canter under saddle

We also took some videos of her trotting. She didn't do her best job there yesterday because there were scary poop piles lying around in the arena. Usually our arena is very clean, but somebody
"shovel-naped" the shovel to get rid of them. So yesterday there were these scary piles lying around. Also another horse suddenly started bumping around in his stall which sent us flying... ;)

trott I

spooky trott

trott II