101st Post.... oh so much rambling.

Here's a question for you all: How often do you trim your horse's feet? Jr is the first horse I've been responsible for hoof care so I'm learning. I keep JR barefoot and he was trimmed/shod August 17 (before I got him), September 17 (pulled the shoes because he was interfering behind) , December 12, and March 4th. He never looks like he needs a trim and seems to grow really evenly. I even had a few people look at his feet in January and February and no one thought they looked bad, BUT what does happen is that he starts to stumble a LOT. Now that he's generally more balanced in the way he carries himself he stumbles less, but when his feet get long he stumbles a lot. I see all kinds of things like "4-12 weeks" between trims. That seems like a rather vague measure. I also read that hooves grow very little in the winter and much more in the spring. Just the last week or so he's been stumbling a bit. Not terribly, but enough for me to notice. Could he possibly need to be trimmed again this soon? (Admittedly the 3 month intervals between his last three trims was longer than I should have done, but like I said, I'm learning and I had several people confirm that they did not LOOK like they needed a trim.) I want him in good form for the show on May 3rd and do not plan to shoe him unless KAT or the farrier think I need to. Should I schedule him for this week? Next week? Is there a rule of thumb? Is it possible to trim too soon?

I made a realization yesterday that made me pretty happy. Though I am not a trainer and will be the first to admit I haven't a clue..... I've become much more comfortable with training sessions on my own. When I first got Junior it was the first time that I had a horse to ride whenever and however I wanted and unless I scheduled a lesson, no one was going to tell me what to do. The effect this had on me was confusion....what do I DO? Do I just walk trot and canter around the arena like it's a pleasure class? I bought the book 101 Arena Exercises which I've still not gotten into. (I took it to the barn and now that I remembered that I could've read that while the boys grazed...dummy.) I guess I just started to find stuff I wanted to do better. It began with lungeing. He was such a turd at it and it made it really tough to burn energy efficiently that I started making him follow my voice commands... walk on, trot, canter, whoa, come in, etc. Now I "drill" stuff all the time. Trying to get him to halt immediately when I ask. Asking him to lope off then halt, then lope off again. Cantering on the rail, then cantering circles, then back to the rail. Those things make sense to me and I can totally see progress there. There are millions of things I need to work on, especially the one thing KAT told me to work on: figure-8 while doing a counter-bend both ways. I do work on that, but it seems more complicated than my little brain can handle. I do much better with it when KAT is telling me what to do the whole time.

I rode just a bit inside and outside today. Yesterday I decided to just lunge him because I was feeling like he'd worked for 7 days straight and deserved a little easier day. I also anticipate needing to lunge him at shows and we haven't done it for so long he might need to be reminded what it's about. Well, he forgot how. It was like he'd never heard voice commands before. I ended up spending a good half an hour working on WHOA. Reminded me of a horse cartoon where one horse says to the other: "Hi! What's your name? Mine's Whoadammit."