Mosquitoes, yuck.

I hate mosquitoes. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck. Especially all the swelling and infection that follows. Ouch. Dear insect repellent, please work better.

This morning, we finished our breakdown of all the criteria that needs to be met in order to consider a horse "started under saddle". Looks like an average horse would take somewhere around 1 month to complete the program, as long as they are all prepared for training and don't have any weird underlying fear issues, etc.

Today was a slow day of training. Everything outside is still all muddy, so it takes some effort to encourage yourself to get out there and work with the horses :) but they absolutely make it worth it.

Spot
Stepping onto the mat and staying there is now no problem for Spot. Today, I wasn't able to get him separated from the donkeys to work with him, but he still did great and paid attention to me the entire session.

Lefty
Poor Lefty had a bit of a scare today. We were out in the yard hanging out by the old trailer when he tripped. He was already a bit on edge because it was sprinkling and pretty windy. Of course it wouldn't have been so bad except that him tripping and skidding away caused me to trip - which totally freaked him out. At least he came right back afterwards...

Roany
Mr. Roany Pony has a home! A local horseshoe-er is adopting him, but is paying for him to stay 2 extra months to get some more handling so Roany will still be here a while longer.

Amigo
Tested Amigo today on the criteria that we finalized this morning. It will be a good exercise for us to make sure he's solid on all of the steps to make sure he has the foundation to become a dependable riding horse.

Hammer
Today was a little better for Hammer. He was definitely still all bumpy, but seemed less upset about it than yesterday. We didn't want to push it though, so we just worked on a little mounting/dismounting bareback with him.

Getting 8 new horses tomorrow! One of them is a foal. Really looking forward to making it all the way through the taming process with these horses. I'll probably be able to get pictures as long as my camera doesn't scare them too badly.