Today I just went to the paddock, shed, detangled manes and tails after a long winter and played at liberty with my three girls. Mostly it was the catching game with Maya, friendly game and driving game with Jasper (to keep her away from dumping out my bucket of grooming tools) and a little friendly, driving, yo-yo and squeeze with Bailey. I spent about 2 hours out there.

Observations: I need to play more online, though their draw was fairly good today, I could easily disconnect them by asking too much, being rude. How small can my phase one be?

I realized the other day that I have the same circling game problems with all three of my horses. Send is okay, then they peter out just behind me and come to visit. Then I get firmer and they get right brained and try to run off. Obviously it's something that I'm doing too much of, not enough of! So I played with that with Maya and asked quietly with loooooong phase 1 and corrected as gently, yet consistently as I could when she stopped on the circle. We ended up with 2 walking laps each way (a level 1 pass!)

I also realized that I need to play every day, not just once a week - that's a whole lot of hours spent horsing around with just other horses - not enough time for me to prove that I'm a good leader. That same day I took Bailey out, thinking to take her back to the driveway and shed her out, but as soon as we left the gate, she started to get unconfident - so I changed plans and just let her eat stray bits of hay near the gate, asking her to back up to new piles of hay or yield her hindquarters/forequarters to move her to other choice spots. Then I put her away. She was pretty unconfident the whole time, but I think that a few more days of that and she'll be able to move further away. We'll see. Learning to read her and not PUSH too much. Hooray for L&HB.

Enough for today.