At the beginning of the year, I posted a fun challenge for my fellow horse folk:
This January -->
Start with an empty jar.
Every week, add one good thing that happened with you and your horse.
On New Years Eve next year, empty the jar and read about the amazing year you and your horse had!
This prompted me to do some thinking... we used to do Team Updates pretty frequently around here. And it was such a fun way to look back and celebrate everything we all accomplished throughout the year! But the past few years, I've really dropped the ball on this!
So I'm bringing it back! This way we all have a fun easy way to look back and see all of our horsie adventures, all we've accomplished, and how much we've all grown!
This January was certainly an eventful one! We started off with my young horse, Dino, going on his first field trip! We had the opportunity to ride with renowned FEI judge Peter Storr. Ummm... what an opportunity!
I knew this would be a bit of a stretch for Dino. He was started quite late (as a four year old, only a few months ago). Due to his sheer size (we don't call him Baby T Rex for nothing! Ha!) and a lack of handling as a young horse before I bought him, we've been going incredibly slow... so he's not exactly super "broke."
But I wasn't going to turn down an opportunity to ride under such amazing dressage eyes, so off we went!
I'm so proud of Dino. He loaded and trailered like a total pro. He stayed away from home for the first time. I rode him away from home for the first time... in a big arena with absolutely no fence (if you've ever ridden a baby horse who still doesn't steer that well, you know the challenge this is!), and under the stress of auditors watching.
We did it! We have much, much to improve on - but we're on our way! Woo hoo!
The last day of the Peter Storr Clinic, two massive wildfires broke out in Los Angeles. Our barn was safe and not in the burn area of either fire. We did our best to help our fellow Angeleno horse community and welcomed fifteen evacuee horses to our small barn that night.
When our evacuee horses moved to a more permanent situation, our riders at Team LGD got right back to work! And entered Virtual Horse Sport's January horse show!
And they rocked it! Heather and Cal competed at Training Level and Jill and Shasta competed at First Level.
Both teams came in first place in their classes with scores over 67%!!! Congrats!!!
Our other teams are working hard, too!
Violet and her new partner Polly are working on developing their teamwork and are introducing Polly to work over fences!
Jeff and Buddy have a BIG project in the works... stay tuned! It's big!
Team work makes the dream work!
Cheers to a successful January and here's to more!
Comments