I don't know if Kieran just felt particularly 'on' today or it was because I chose to warm up by walking and trotting outside of the ring instead of inside the ring but whatever it was...well, he was really 'on' today and stayed interested in what we were doing right up until the end.
Basically, Jessica set up a course for us to trot or canter through, whichever we felt comfortable, and mostly I was supposed to decide what our path would be and how to get there (and when my path didn't always work out the way I intended, we spent some time talking about what happened and how I could improve it. Mostly we got hung up at the bending line pair of jumps she put in the middle of the ring).
It looked something like this:
Basically, along the left side was a combination of three jumps. It was something like the two on top were one stride away and then it was two strides to the one in the corner (and the one on top started out as a crossrail, that's what the red line is for).
The two jumps in the middle were on a bending line (started as crosses and then became verticals later) and were probably the most difficult part for us because we kept swinging a bit too wide most of the time. The vertical line in between them was a vertical jump she made using two barrels and there red lines show poles Jessica put up near the end of the lesson to 'funnel' us toward the middle of the jump and encourage Kieran to really pick his front feet up.
The thick line on the right side was a vertical the whole time and the thinner line was a ground pole set out a couple of strides. They were not all this close together but as usual, this is not to scale.
Anyway, it ended up being a fun lesson and it was nice how even in the beginning for the little crossrails, Kieran jumped over everything. Sometimes with crossrails, he just trots over and is like, "seriously? this is boring yo". Though once near the end of the lesson he totally just trotted over the vertical on the right even though it was like two feet.
I can't detail everything we did at this point but generally it was nice to see that we were working together well and that, for the most part, as long as I didn't focus too much on the "omg that's crazy" (which is what I did when Jessica made the "funnel" jump the first time and then lost my focus on what path we were doing), we could get through a 'course' fairly decently. And Jessica says now that Kieran seems to know what his job is, we're going to work more on focusing on my equitation over fences since it's kind of...well, at least I stay out of his way mostly? :)
There should be video soon, Jessica took some with her iphone, I just have to wait for her to send it to me. I am hoping after Christmas I will have a new camera again.
