#Lilja just deadass doesn't do things sometimes just because

[islenskihesturinn]

While Lilja's being brought back into training, I'm taking lessons with Fjara to teach her to use those damn hind muscles to not trip and fall constantly. My dad's fallen off her three times due to tripping and he's not quite capable of helping Fjara get that posture back in the right place.

So here I am, risking my life (don't know her quite well enough under the saddle and I am not a courageous person)and limbs (I've got about 6 bruises on my legs now due to Fjara casually scraping past trees with my leg) to get miss ma'am back into proper shape and see if my dad gets the courage to ride her a bit again.

We've been working on leadership with groundwork, we're working on fixing that very lateral tölt (she's making quite a lot of progress already!), asking her for trot (did short bursts of trot today) and canter because last time I got one jump and she went straight into something resembling pace. Today I got:

a buck when I gave her the cue for canter

more pace

then three strides of canter before a very lateral tölt

a decent tölt, followed by a sort of scramble only a five gaited horse can manage

and then all of a sudden things clicked, Fjara went 'oh!', I learned what going very fast really means, and we cantered properly.

It's so funny, this horse is so fast in (re)developing her skills. With Lilja it's never gone this smooth, and it kind of makes me realise what a huge difference between training these two horses have had.

Also, extremely different personalities.