Getting Closer...

The plan is to start riding Stitch on my next week of vacation - which starts next Friday. We still have some prep to do before I think he's ready.

On Monday, we did our second attempt at ground driving off the bit. This time we used the full arena, which had some construction going on at the time. Stitch stopped a couple of times to stare, but I just let him have a moment and then asked him to walk again so there was no drama.

He did really well with the steering, mostly staying soft. There were a bunch of ground poles scattered around, and they gave us something to steer over and around.

I noticed that he was a wee bit harder to turn to the left. Whenever I let him loose in the arena he wants to spend 95% of the time tracking right. So, I'm guessing that left will be his tougher side, which sucks because that is also my tougher side.

On Wednesday I enlisted the friend who is going to help me with Stitch's first few days under saddle to hold him while I put full weight in the saddle. I've leant over his back lots, but when I tried to put my full weight over him without a saddle last week he kept stepping away from the mounting block. I'm too short (too fat, too stiff, too chicken) to not use the mounting block, so I waited until I could have a helper to try again.

I did the whole build up from just putting a little bit of weight in a stirrup to full weight in the stirrup to lying on my stomach across his back. Stitch was super about all of it, and was far more concerned about when the next treat was going to appear than what was happening on his back. The first time we asked him to take a few steps he was a little tentative, totally to be expected, the next time he took 6 or 7 steps that felt forward and confident so that's where I left him.

One day I'll figure out how to set up my new Pivo properly.

I'm sure I could have slid my leg over and he would have been fine with it, but I'm in no rush. The plan is to do it again on Friday, and if all goes well I might try it that day.

Over the next ten or so days I want to do more ground driving to make sure the steering is good, some lunging to make sure the voice aid to trot is prompt (it mostly is), and some ground work that will have him move away from my hand when it's where my leg will be. Then I will be much more confident when it's time to be let loose.