Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, OH MY!

I promised I'd update about my lesson with E on Friday and never did (I'm getting really bad about that!). So, here goes... It was good and Limerick actually paid attention to me, despite the fact that he hadn't been in the indoor for a while and it now looks quite a bit different. There are lots of new, scary things, but he managed to keep his brain. We started out in a working walk and E told me that I use my hands too much. She said that you see a lot of people visibly "vibrating" and wiggling their hands and she thought I had just tried to replicate that, which is true. She made me stop and took my hands in hers, showing me the almost unnoticeable and infinitesimal amount of pressure that I should be using. It was kind of a crazy realization, and Limerick actually responded much better to me asking more subtly. She also made me basically glue my elbows to my sides and keep my hands fisted, all while making sure not to let any rein slip through my fingers, which is a lot harder than it sounds. I actually have a lot of trouble keeping the reins at a consistent length and not letting them slide, which I apparently do without even noticing =/ Other than that, we worked on flexion and getting Limerick to really bend to the left and right. The whole lesson was one big circle around E and was almost entirely trotting and walk-trot transitions. It sounds boring, but it was quite a struggle/challenge (for some reason, I have a much harder time using my hands tracking left..?) with some awesome moments when we actually got it. E seemed to be really proud of the progress we've made since August and I felt pretty accomplished afterwards :) 

Looking humongous 

compared to the door...

Like Hill said over at her blog, she and I went out to the farm last night and had fun in the indoor. I started out bareback but decided I wanted to actually do work, so I ran and grabbed my saddle. Also like H mentioned, getting on Limmers bareback with a normal size mounting block was quite the struggle... he's a wide 16.3 hands and hard to mount with stirrups, so I had to figure out a better alternative. Enter a barrel that we for some reason have in the indoor. I pulled it up next to the mounting block, stepped on the block and then onto the barrel, which was the perfect height for swinging my leg over Limerick (suck it, Hillary). Then I mostly worked at the canter and had some really shitty transitions, which made me decide to work on little else in our ride today. He obviously knows what I'm asking for but has decided that he can try a running trot instead of actually transitioning to canter... not fun. 

Because of that little show last night, Limmerface got to work his little butt off today on transition after transition. He was pissy and stubborn the second we got into the ring and alternated between *tail swish*/*ear pin*. Quite the drama queen/llama and ran around the whole time looking like I was torturing him to a slow and painful death... yeah, I think it's time to have the chiro out again! The BFF got a full 6 minutes of video so you can relive the fun. You'll see that if I even so much as asked him to put his head down and bend, he would throw it up and run around like a freaking giraffe. There were a couple of moments that I got so mad at him that I literally forced him to put his head where I wanted it, which I hated because the last thing I want to do is be too harsh with him or pull on his mouth too much. Anyways, we ended on a good note and spent some nice time around the property, enjoying the reprieve from the endless rain we've had this past week.