Diva Progress

I would like to do a dump of information about Diva this spring.  As I brought her back into work after the long cold winter she was good to ride as far as not needing lunged and such.  She was terrible to ride as far as remembering the things she learned last fall and early winter.  She was fussy and pissy and completely beside herself.  There were better rides and worse rides, and I was getting frustrated.
Good Points:

• Better canter
• More coordinated
• Weight gain
• Awesome hoof growth
• Slightly quieter mouth
• Jumping showing improvement

Bad Points:

• Can't apply leg aids without a fit
• New evasion methods tested:
• Head straight in air
• Running through my leg
• Kicking out
• Attempting to buck
• Squealing in opposition

The fact that many of these seemed really out of character from the lovely mare I had last year had the wheels turning in my head.  I got her teeth floated, helped some, but not astounding amounts.  Husband came out and did body work, BAM!  Turns out she had ribs out of place, poor princess.  I felt really bad, but we suddenly had some better rides.  It still wasn't perfect though and she still seemed inconsistent.  Finally I started her on regumate, it was amazing!  Seriously, we still had to work through her large opinion, but we could actually put in productive rides.  We went from this:

Grrrr

To this:

Booyah!

This awesome picture was actually after three days without regumate, I mistakenly thought that we had kicked her out of heat.  LOL.  So I decided to join in a lesson with sprinklerbandit the next day.  Oh for horses making us look like fools.

Oh Diva

She was back to kicking and squealing and being totally insane.  Steph finally asked me, 'are you afraid she is going to go through the arena fence?'  'Yes, yes I am.'  So she got on and I was happy to watch for a while.  Diva tried every evasion (it was nice to see it was all stuff I could easily handle), but finally gave it up and went well.  I got back on and we discussed how I can't let Diva trick me into a fight.  I have to let her figure it out and I can't take it personally.  We agreed that while regumate may help, we women have to deal with hormones so Diva at least has to try.  Steph also rode her in spurs which was a first, after some throwing of large opinions Diva didn't seem to mind them.

For the next few rides before I went out of town I rode with spurs and a running martingale.  I think there was angelic singing.  When she went to throw her head in the air she would hit the rings and quietly return from the stratosphere.  Then when she would try to run sideways instead of trying to passify her to avoid the destruction of property I would just apply my spur, AND DIVA SAID, 'AYE AYE CAPTAIN!'

Check it out!

I am now home and battling 105 degree weather, but I hope to have a Diva update very soon.