Another good lesson!

I finally got my first lesson since the fall today! Pro didn't let me down (and I only let him down a little bit ;)).

We worked on the same stuff Kate's been doing in her lessons, but Kate's mini-lessons during our tag-teaming two weeks ago really paid off as I didn't have to start totally from scratch. When his head went up at the beginning of the lesson I just kept my hands in position and we worked on fixing it with my seat. Gayle explained that when he inverts he does a lateral walk. The way to fix this is evidently to not let my seat follow the lateral walk, but rather to use them properly. So I worked on not letting my seat bones follow the motion back behind me, but rather slide forward under me. It's a hard thing to describe, but visually it's sort of like instead of letting the horse's hind legs trail out behind him, I'm stopping them in line with his butt so he can't be so strung out (Kate, correct me if I'm wrong about this). So then we had him semi-marching forward and a little less inverted.

The next step was to get him between the aids. We did small circles off the outside aides first to establish those, and then once that was done we worked on getting him off my inside leg. Gayle said that I should still use the inside rein to keep him from pointing his head out (thank GOD, that was killing me ;)). There are times when he's trying to get me to pull that I'm supposed to soften, but I don't have to throw it away entirely. We started out with some pretty unsubtle aides and he fairly rapidly gave me a decent walk, but then I worked on pushing him further in front of me with my seat. So he'd round up and walk nicely and I was supposed to say "Thank you, now give me more" until he was REALLY stepping out in front of me. Gayle said one thing that I found especially useful with Pro's wormy-ness and said that I should feel like he's equally in front of me on both sides. If he was less in front of me on the outside then I either needed to move my outside aides back some or fix the fact that he was leaning on my inside leg.

The rest of the lesson was basically tweaking things and working to improve from where we were at, with the aim of very subtle cues and getting him comfortable with his work. At the trot we did a little bit to try to get him comfortable with being more up against the bit by not giving when he'd tweak his head asking me to follow him. My hands aren't the steadiest at the trot so Gayle, Pro, and I were ok with not asking him to go up against my hands too much. Gayle said that he's not at the point quite yet where he's comfortable with fixed hands anyway, so hopefully I can fix myself before he needs them to progress.

He was a VERY good pony though and very forgiving. At one point we were trotting around and he was strutting his stuff and I saw a deer fly on him up near his ears. Without really thinking about it I reached up and whacked him on the neck to try to get it for him. It made a really loud slap sound (and I missed the stupid fly anyway) and apparently Pro's expression was hilarious. But after a couple softer pats and apologies he just sort of shrugged and went back to work. He really does have a great work ethic!

Kate is going to edit in more pictures to show the progression from weird inverted-camel Pro to Hot-Stuff Pro, but here's the one I've got so far! I get two more days of riding this weekend while Kate's being a wild-child, so I'm hoping I can really solidfy the concepts from the lesson.

**Edited - I added more pictures! :) -Kate