Heat

Poor Miss Dee has had a rough week. She is in an absolutely crazy heat right now and just seems a little miserable. Yesterday was our weekly lesson, and for starters, I'm pretty sure that she just sat hard on the butt bar the entire ride over, because her tail was a matted mess and I could feel her being a little all over the place while I was driving, which is not usually like her. Then, as soon as we got into the ring, she peed (and had squatted about 7 times while I was grooming her at home). When I got on, she was feeling very stiff behind and just tense in general. Normally, she's a tad bit lazy, but once you tell her 'forward', she's good to go and pretty good about maintaining the engine by herself. Yesterday, she just kept stalling. She was determined to be behind the leg most of the time. We spent about 15 minutes just trying to get her to relax and go forward, and it helped a little, but she just wasn't in the game. After that, we had her hop over a little cross rail a few times. Even doing that, she was tense tense tense - stiff as a board in the turns and just lit up about the whole thing. At one point, I'm pretty certain that we did about 6 flying changes in a row down the center of the ring after the jump... impressive, but not at all what I wanted, since she was basically just running away with me a little. I finally convinced her to quiet down a little bit and then Nancy saddled up one of her horses and took us out on our FIRST TRAIL RIDE! It seemed like the perfect thing to do, because Dee was obviously not feeling so hot physically and we've been talking about taking her out. She was, of course, absolutely brilliant. First, she had to leave the indoor through a narrow doorway with a little drop down to the outdoor ring. She didn't even bat an eye at that, and then she dealt with turned out horses running the fence line, a wooden bridge and a big mucky puddle like she'd seen it all a million times. What a good girl! To celebrate, she peed in the aisle when we got back.
Today was nothing short of a disaster. She was SO stiff behind and SO reluctant to go forward. I didn't end up doing much, because she was just totally out of sorts (she even squealed at my leg once, which she's NEVER done). I can't really blame her - I know she's having a bit of a tough time with her hormones this week. So tonight I put lots of shavings in her stall and gave her a giant pile of hay so that she could just chill out and unwind. She usually goes out at night (and often during the day) unless it's bad weather, but I know that she enjoys being in her stall for some alone time. I'm hoping she'll benefit from just having a good rest. We'll see how she does tomorrow.


Still a bit skinnier than I'd like, but look at that face! It was pretty overcast when I took the pictures... I wish the sun was out, because her coat is looking absolutely gorgeous lately and these pictures don't show it at all.