A Super XC School

I haven't exactly kept up with this blog as much as I'd like, but it's not too late to update from a few days ago! This past Wednesday, we took a trip to go to Poplar one last time to XC school before champs. It went really really well! Even though Katie couldn't be there (she was doing unimportant things like having a baby...), we had help from Ashley Giles! Ashley is super nice and will be helping me at champs next weekend as well, since new baby will still be too new to make a road trip :( Boo. I won't have Katie there, but I will have Ashley's great help.. It's just not the same as your own trainer though :/ Anyways, the school was AWESOME and Fanny didnt really look at anything, even the trakehner :D We did a few new prelim things, which is always super fun. I'm feeling ready and excited for next weekend! Although today we took a trip over to PHJA.. I'm tired so I'll split this blog in two and write about that tomorrow ;)

The Adventures of Area A

This whole week has been great! We took a trip up to Poplar on Tuesday for XC schooling and Fanny was perfect. We did some technical training lines, did our first prelim steeplechase fence, jumped through a house for the first time, and conquered some other prelim questions! We had no problems with trakehners or ditches today, which was a great feeling :D I also did the prelim up bank down bank bounce and then I finally found a jump I hated more than ditches, the awful prelim tree corner. I don't really know what is so awful about it, it just wasn't a good ride. According to Katie, it causes a lot of problems for other people too. But, we're gonna school it every time we go so it'll get better and better and be perfect before I run prelim in the fall :) Anyways, this weekend we made the short trip over to Marianna for the 4H Area A Horse Show. It was soooo much fun to finally have friends at a show! Every horse trial I go to, it's just my trainer and I. I loved having friends and we all did great. A total of seven riders came from our county and cleaned up in every division there was! Since Fanny was a little too "high class" for Area and Rain still isn't trained enough, I chose to take my big Alex man :) He's always reliable, loves to show, and never fails to try as hard as he can to please. We basically got robbed in our dressage class because the judge admitted she had no idea what she was doing because she'd only ever even watched dressage once. We got second because his headset was supposedly tense because "he wasn't looking around at everything" and apparently I shouldn't have ridden into my corners.... It's like it was Opposite Day and no one told us! But oh well. On Saturday, we did the rest of our classes. We got fifth in showmanship (out of nine), which is a really big accomplishment for me because I'm usually awful at showmanship :D Then we got first in two out of three of our hunter classes and third in our last hunter class. If I wouldn't have won the dressage or the last hunter class I would have won overall English junior high point! But unfortunately since we did not win either, we didn't get that title :( It's alright though, we'll be back next year ;) Now ill be focusing on getting Fanny 100% ready to rock it at Area champs in a few weeks!