Destiny - Dressage Diva

Hoping to keep this short (wishful thinking I hear you sigh) as I actually only spent 10mins in the saddle Sunday, as per my instructions from Mrs B to keep Kika to a maximum of 20mins work - lungeing included.

As I mentioned in my previouus post, Kika's saddle is currently not fitting her correctly, using it will only undo the work done by Mrs B and make her uncomfortable and ratty - Kika is very sensitive about her back, this fact has been well documented within this blog. We tried a couple of saddles belonging to friends to see if (m)any of these would be better fits - my friend N's Dressage Saddle was the best of the ones we tried.
So Kika got lunged with it on Saturday evening for her allocated 20mins work to see how she took to it - glad to report that she didn't appear, to me, to take a blind bit of notice of the fact that she had a different type of saddle on her back - although thanks to Mrs B's work she was moving a lot more freely and no longer stiff behind - Happy Days!


Sunday's 20minutes allocated work time was to consist of 10mins lungeing and then 10mins in the saddle for me. Wow is riding in a dressage saddle different to a General Purpose saddle. Immediately I had to drop my stirrups a whole from where I'd estimated they should be (length of my arm from knuckles to ochster) - and I really should have dropped them another hole (I will next time I borrow the saddle) as my knees still weren't in the correct place and are kind of sensitive today
But seeing as we were limited to 10minutes work i figured it'd be alright for the time we were allowed to do stuff. Nothing overly exciting to report, only that i could see myself being swayed into doing more dressage saddle riding as I was well impressed with the position of my leg and how Kika was responding to it. I also felt considerably more secure in my seat.
Just need to fix my stirrups better for the next spin and my knees won't be a little on the sensitive side like they are today!

Didn't do more than walk/trot in the 10minutes, and it wasn't really long enough to get Kika's full attention despite the prior lungeing. So she managed a good impersination of a Giraffe, but she was calm and will take a few spins to adjust to the different feel of the saddle and indeed my weight distribution in it. I was able to monitor the speed of her trot and coax her into a better carriage for a couple of strides here and there but I wasn't going to push it as we all have our own readjustment phases...

Quick Snapshot - Just for good measure

I actually only realised in saving the image to my pc and uploading it that this is the first pic of Kika from 2012, and we're approaching the end of month 2!!
Hopefully the little snapshot is rewarding after all the waffle!