Jumpin' JJ: Part Deux

Had a blast this weekend!!! So much good stuff - I love this little man!

On Saturday I was trotting around the ring and over poles on the ground, having a grand ole' time. Sue turned her attention to me. Anytime she sees that JJ is going nice and calm she decides to its time for a challenge. She set up a couple cross rails and had me go over them one at a time. Meh, no problem! We've done that! With success over single crossrails she had me do two in a row. Aside from a fair amount of wiggle-wormy-ness in between, JJ was fine.

Sue seemed to be getting bored so she dropped one of the crossrails and made a two foot vertical out of it. I was watching her and seeing the 2' jump I said NO! We had never done a vertical - I wasn't ready to start over something two feet high! In my head all I could imagine was JJ coming up and leaping over the jump as though it were 5' tall instead of 2' tall. If you've ever seen a young horse learning to jump, this is a fairly common reaction.

An explanation of jumps for all you non-horsey people :)

"Relax! I was just seeing how high it was!" she answered. She put the jump down to about 18'' - the lowest it could be set. "Come on over!"

What I expected to happen

I relaxed, knowing I had to trust Sue and I had to trust JJ. He had never even tried anything bad and he had never been anything but predictable. Why would he throw a wrench in the system now? He didn't. He trotted over the vertical so easily that if I had closed my eyes I wouldn't have even known it was there.

Up it went to 21''. JJ's reaction was the same.

What actually happened.. More or less...

24''. Back to the height it started at. I was laughing at this point. Stupid me, what had I been so worried about? JJ tried to trot over it again but couldn't lift his legs high enough at the trot and stumbled a bit. "OK, so you need a little more leg in front of the jump so he starts to get the right idea", Sue said. Right. I brought him around again. He wiggle-wormed in front of the jump as if to say hey are you paying attention? You're steering me into something when there's plenty of space on either side to go around it! I got him up to the fence and squeezed, and up he went into a little hop over the jump and landed in a confused canter. I'm pretty sure I had a huge smile on my face at this point and patted JJ happily. Yay! We did the jump a few more times before I cooled JJ out.

On a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon we tried another canter - this time to the right. JJ picked up the right lead and we did a couple rather decent circles on the top half of the ring. Yahoo!!