Wide-Eyed and Legless

Dee has been excellent on the lounge line lately. We've been doing lots of transitions, and she's been getting better and better. Today, I decided that I would get on and do a little after our session. Well, it didn't go exactly as I hoped. As soon as I got on, she was right into her snarky, "i'm not going forward attitude". I handled things a little differently today, though. Nancy told me to stop worrying about things and JUST GO FORWARD. Well, when she gets in these moods, the more I push about going from walk to trot, the less forward she goes. With this knowledge, I just stopped asking for trot. Instead, I decided that since we were walking already, we would continue to walk, but we would do the MOST FORWARD walk we possibly could. Well, it worked exactly like I wanted it to, because she got fed up with marching along at the walk and started trying to break into trot. However, I insisted that we stay walking, because she has to know that she doesn't dictate what we do. Once she stopped trying to break into trot and resigned herself to marching along, I asked for trot. Guess what? She marched forward in working trot! My only goal in the trot was forwardness. Tilt your head to the side? Pretend to be a giraffe? Be my guest. Just keep trotting forward. Eventually, she realized that it was easier to keep going forward if she stopped fussing, and she actually ended up stretching into my contact and marching along. We even managed some nice canter work going right. Our left lead canter, on the other hand, seems to have disappeared. I think part of the problem going left was that I didn't have her straight enough, so every time I asked for canter, she picked up the right lead. Interestingly enough, at one point, I asked for canter and got a very impressive saddle bronc move from her - head between knees, back rounded, all four feet off the ground. When all four feet ended up back on the ground, I was excited to find her on the left lead, so we just went with it. She didn't work hard today, but we DID do an awful lot. I think I was on her for an hour, and I'll tell you what - I'm sure my legs will be yelling at me tomorrow!