Last time I rode Howdy, I noted to myself that standing still was not really his thing.   So today, I sat on him while I taught a lesson.

We stood still a while, then walked in circles a lot and did some more halting and did some bending.  Actually, I wasn’t paying that much attention to him.  I was mostly focusing on Jean and Sammy as they worked on cavaletti and transitions.  This morning I read this very nice blog post about Will Faudree and young horses on the USEA site and it got me to thinking about bending in general and the inside leg to outside rein connection and I was just fooling around with it.

Meanwhile, Jean and Sammy had some nice canter work:

Toward the end of Jean’s lesson, Howdy figured out how to bend right.  All of a sudden he noticed he could shorten the right side of his body and lengthen the left half.  I should mention that I’m actually quite stoked about this.  As you may know, Howdy has a slight club foot on his right front and often horses are not as handy at bending toward their club foot side.  Knowing this, I was prepared for it to be a long, slow process.  Turns out, to get a good start on it, it took about an hour of just playing around and allowing it to happen.  Huh.  There’s a nice surprise.

Well, its not a right bend, but its kinda cute anyway.