Winter Pursuits

First a reference to the 'Why I Love My Horse' stories that many bloggers posted for Valentines Day (suggested by the Literary Horse I believe). I loved these stories! I love hearing about how people acquire and develop a bond with their horses. There was so much interesting background that I learned about many of the bloggers I follow.
I've posted several times about why I love and treasure Rogo, so I won't bore anyone again with it at this time. I can't make any promises about the future though :)
Doug and I did free lunging over a jump and ground poles with Savanah, Rogo and Dan yesterday. They get better and better each time we do it. I can really see Rogo starting to figure out what jumps are. We switched from cross rails to a 3+ ft. jump with Savanah and Rogo and they did great, sometimes going over it together. It was sooo pretty. We do Dan separately. Three of them at liberty at the same time would be too much!
Rogo will totally stay on the circuit to do the poles and jump, and feels very responsible to herd Savanah around it too. He doesn't actually touch her - just gets behind her and uses body language to drive her forward and stay on the track. She thinks it's really funny if she ducks out every few turns. She thinks she's really putting one over on us. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how they are doing, lengthening over the poles and figuring out the jump. It's conditioning them and they're having fun.
I got some great feedback on my equitation goals from my last post (thanks very much - I'm going to use this stuff) and clearly I can't work on equitation without being on my horse :( . My plan when I got to the barn was that Doug would  lunge me on Rogo after the free lunging, but Rogo went so well and had so much fun I was loath to make him do serious work. I remember my goal of fun only days while working on forward. If I can get him going forward better it will solve about 75% of my equitation issues, so it isn't a total loss.
Today we stayed home and had Joan, our original dressage teacher (who I'm now able to go back to after family health issues kept her away for a while), down for lunch and viewing dressage videos from dressageclinic.com . We had a ball. She selected Arthur Kottas, Stephan Peters, Betsey Steiner and George Williams for this first session. We didn't watch the complete session with all of them (it would have taken too long), but we got a good flavor of each with a young horse. Here are Joan, Doug and Mom by the fire, eating quiche that Doug made, salad that I made and having a glass of wine. Doug made brownies for desert. Winter dressage has it's leisurely days too :)

Tomorrow the two week goals get attacked - connection, long canter legs and legs lightly on at all times.