Horses or Hippos?

You guys be the judges...

The poor starving creatures come when they see may on the off chance i might feed them
- Sorry Zephyrs...no such luck!

I finally got out of work at a reasonable hour today, so i zipped home, changed and legged it up to the yard, to play with the tanks - yep, you'll see from the unedited photos accompanying this post that the pair of my girls are the sizes of houses.

The flies & their sticking to the gate made body shots to show the full horror of the FAT difficult

I have managed to put three rides on Nancy since getting back to the, excluding the spin through the woods to get both girls back - yep life has been just that crazy busy - sad times!
She has been a sweetheart for all three of those spins, the first one we worked for a grand total of 20minutes I'd say & I didn't push the boat out further than walk-trot.
Second spin, we had one small canter on each rein for a circle and down the long side of the large indoor arena.

Cray-cray eye - spooky N ;)

Today i pushed the boat out a little further, we did a bit more work in walk, lots of diagonal changes of rein, figures of 8 & serpentines before doing some very nice trot work again fleshing out the same movements as we'd done in the walk before getting some very nice bursts of canter work on each rein. She got tired pretty quickly bless her as it was hot, so we kept it simple.

Post ride & flash - hence shiney shiney

Kika who is by far the heavier of the two, or at least Nancy is bigger boned so potentially carries the extra pounds better than Kika who is doing a wonderful imitation of a blimp ready to sprout triplets!
K has had three spins in the walker while I rode & looked after N (K spun for a good hour each time), I lunged her for 30 minutes on Saturday, 10 minutes of which was in the pessoa - other 20 were warming up and cooling down...bear in mind she had spent an hour in the walker beforehand also. I finally sat on her this evening and we covered the basics in walk and trot to re-engage the brain while not over-taxing the limbs which are carrier a hella weight! (as you can see from the photos).

Shiney McBright-Penney

Not only has work been keeping me uber-busy and out of the saddle, although thankfully not away from the girls now that they are closer to home - poo-picking & fencing counts as pony-bonding time right?!
But both girls badly need pedicures - K pulled her shoes while i was in Canada and as she wasn't doing much (I think she's been ridden a grand total of 10 times since May) I wasn't in a particular rush to call out the farrier to put shoes on when she was just trudging around a field and taking the odd spin into the woods. However since i moved them both back closer to the yard at the start of July - i have been trying to coordinate with the blacksmith to come sort them out as the are now way overdue & i am mortified by how bad i have let their feet get.
*shame-faced*

Fatty McHugerson

Appointment has been finally secured for friday evening, when both girls & I are hopefully going to be going into serious boot-camp/re-fitness mode.

I am actually going to set myself a goal for the rest of the month of July ... to RIDE MY HORSES & hopefully get us all back into shape! Yep - groundbreaking stuff here guys...here's hoping saying it "out-loud" by posting it on my blog accounts to some sort of accountability right?

If i can coordinate with the "new" trainer at my yard, I am hoping to start taking lessons with her. Hopefully one a week - alternating the girls if i can...The Guru has been the most wonderful help to me for the last 3-4years, but sadly our timetables no longer mesh like they used to and i am worried that if i spend too much time working on my own unsupervised i am going to end up boring myself and the horses while simultaneously ingraining all my even bad habits further!
Fingers crossed for things working out with this new trainer!!!!