One Year!

My little nugget is growing up! She turned 5 in July and has grown and changed so much over the last year.

Our first  ride at home, August 24th, 2013

We "celebrated" our 1 year anniversary at Steepleview Horse Trials, Bailey's second show. I'll start with our first, though, as I failed to blog about it earlier.

Roebke's was pretty great for B's first show. Dressage and SJ were the first day, and it was a rainy, crappy, gloomy day. The dressage was a little rough - a wet, very worn grass ring brought lots of slipping to an already spooky test. The show photog was working the next ring over, and between being out there all alone and the scary scary photographer, our test involved a lot of Keeping A Lid On It. We scored a very, very generous 43.50. Show jumping went much better despite some rocky beginnings - right before I got on, Bailey was being a big bully on the ground and reacted badly to my (exhausted, reactive) discipline and reared up a bit and ended up sliding to half fall over backwards. Bad pony! We got to warm up and Bailey came back into herself over the fences. She put in a nice round, especially for the scary fences and being exposed to fillers for the first time - just a bit of time because we trotted most of the course to keep things in control. XC was much better than it looks - Bailey went out gangbusters but we have to overtake a very slow rider in front of us and it consequently cost us some focus, and we picked up a stop after the water. She brought me home strong and seemed very ready to go back out and do it again, so it was still very positive. 

Steepleview was Bailey's second show, and after her stall walking fun at Roebke's, we went armed with a fan and several tubes of Smartpak's Smartcalm paste. It worked like a charm, and I had a happy, relatively calm horse who LOVED her fan and didn't stall walk a hole in her stall or do too much damage to her pretty self. Dressage felt a thousandfold better than Roebkes (no spooking, only a few moments of lost focus) but we had a less merciful judge to score a 39.5 to put us in 7th. Or XC was pretty close after dressage, and I was a little nervous as the starter course wasn't as friendly as I was anticipating. However, the minute Bailey went into warm up she clicked into XC Pony mode and was 110% in it to win it; forward, sassy and foot perfect. She rocked around XC for her first double clear and came home confident and still looking for fences, and we galloped our way into 2nd. Going into SJ, I was a little nervous - Bailey was slightly less calm on Sunday, and it was hot and stormy. Warm up was uneventful and I was a little nervous about her lack of apparent energy. She went into the ring, I pushed for more trot and got a canter... and just went with it. She was fatigued enough to not be pissed as I picked her distances for her, which was nice, and she put in what I am calling another double clear round. We did have a rail, but it fell long after we had passed which makes me wonder if the wind didn't help us out a little bit. 

All in all, we maintained second place for a pretty red ribbon and Bailey's first victory gallop! We head to Roebke's Run again in a little over a week.  Photos to come!

A & BB