Welcome, can I get you a hot cup of coffee or some sweet tea? I have whipped up a batch of chocolate chip cookies, half a batch so we have the perfect amount to eat this weekend. I have had a busy month of April. I am happy to say that after the first two weeks of April we are finally warming up here which I am thoroughly enjoying. I have never seen a wetter, colder winter here in Southern California. I know, I know, I don’t know what cold really is since we never see snow here but the unseasonably cold winter made me appreciate even more where we live.

I thought I would also say that I am trying to think positively concerning my family issues I wrote about in my last blog post. I will stay patient, calm and I will keep busy as all I can do is keep looking forward to the future and pray for forgiveness and happiness. As each day comes and goes I have more good days than sad days, and I am so thankful for my horses as they give me purpose and joy. Speaking of horses, I have a lot to share as my horsey sister who lives in Idaho came and visited for two weeks.

She came at the end of March which was a rainy time and we had to let the arena dry out before we could ride, just a few days. We had so much FUN with the horses and I wanted to work on many things with young Murphy with my sister here. I will say that having her here the first few weeks of April was a wonderful distraction. I so appreciate my sister’s and all of my family’s love and support. ❤

I told my sister that I wanted to work on desensitizing with Murphy. He is 5 years old this year, it’s almost his birthday May 1st. I have always believed that doing ground work which includes working in the arena with scary things to get your horse use to said scary items and teach them that these things will not hurt them. We want our horses to be less sensitive and we want them to see that they are safe with us in hopes that if we were out on the trail and a scary item blows in the wind, for example, we will be able to remain calm and work through the scary event. Murphy in general is very brave!

We started with a plastic bag we tied to the end of a lunge whip. All I had was a carrot bag on this day and I will work more with him as I later brought to the barn a white plastic grocery bag. I will work in the arena like how my sister is here. He followed the small plastic carrot bag all around the arena as my sister walked along. He is so curious, but remained calm and didn’t run around all crazy like I have seen some horses do. Remember horses are fight and flight animals ~ so if over stimulated their flight instincts can send them into overdrive. This is why we are working on desensitizing. 😀

In between the arena work with fun items we also rode Murphy and we had fun working him under saddle. He had most of the winter off with all the crummy weather as it was difficult to find ride times and he never missed a beat nor forgot anything we had been working on. He actually is very smart and we just picked up where we left off.

My husband has a handful of flags and he let me borrow two flags that we brought to the stables to work with Murphy. One as you can see is the American flag and the other is an Air Force flag. He was very curious of these flags and I have many photos and videos of everything we did but will share the best ones here. After we worked in the arena, we tacked him up and presented the flags while we rode him around the arena. My sister has lots of experience with all of these things because she use to ride in the mounted Chino Hills Posse, which is connected with the Chino Hills Police Dept. She helped the unit desensitize their mounted horses. This is how they got them use to parades and other events they attended.

I am so proud of Murphy! He could be my parade horse, haha. I highly doubt I will ever ride in a parade but he is not afraid of the flags!

May I get you a refill? I will warn you this will be a rather long post because I have so much to share! It’s all horsey stuff as there is more I introduced to Murphy. I think the next thing we did was see what he would do if we introduced a jump. This wasn’t necessary for desensitizing but more for the future if I should want to jump him. When they are young and never seen a jump, sometimes they jump exceedingly high over it, but as you can see in this next video Murphy wasn’t too impressed and just loped right over it with no effort at all. After he went over it lose, we mounted up and jumped him while riding. He barely picked up his feet, silly guy! I may work more with the jumping, nothing too serious, just for fun and to keep his interest. I love that I can ride him in my English saddle and jump, or ride him in my western saddle and work on western dressage, so versatile! ❤

As we worked with Murphy we did not forget about Miss Chloe. My sister rode a friends horse Fashion out on the trail while I rode Chloe. We had lots of fun rides and it is the best exercise for Chloe. She can’t be ridden in the arena any more as she has arthritis and so walking on the trails is the best for her. I call it motion is the lotion, and she always is walking better after our rides.

Let’s see, the next thing I thought of was using a tarp for the last desensitizing session with Murphy. Thankfully my sister’s son had a blue tarp to use in the arena. For the non horsey folks out there the odds of having to walk on a tarp is highly unlikely but a tarp is a common item horse trainers use to get horses use to unusual sounds while walking over it. I finally found something Murphy was definitely afraid of, so much so we could not get him to walk across it or on it. We used a little grain in a bucket to entice him to walk on the tarp, but all we could get was one hoof. He ate off the tarp which was good. It was a good session and I was very pleased.

After we put Murphy in his stall I told my sister that I had never tried Chloe with the tarp. So she went to get Chloe and put her in the arena lose and she walked right up to the tarp on the ground. We then went in the arena with the bucket and I was able to video my wonderful girl doing what she does best! She is a wonderful trail horse that has seen it all. At 19 years old she is a solid horse and a wonderful partner. I am so thankful for her and love her so very much! ❤ Here is the video!

Afterwards, when we were driving home from the barn my sister said we should take Murphy out with Chloe in the arena and show him how she walked on the tarp. He may see that it isn’t going to eat him or hurt him and may have followed Chloe but we ran out of time and we never did try and I had to return the tarp to my nephew. I am not too worried that Murphy didn’t walk on it, and at least he was introduced to it and I have plenty of time to try again in the future. I’m going to end with one last video of me riding Murphy. He is maturing and filling out and looks so handsome trotting around. He is so much FUN!!

I have had so much fun sharing all things horses! AND four video’s! I actually am running out of room here on this blog for media uploads. I need to open up a YouTube account and put my video’s there and then attach here is what I see most bloggers do but I haven’t even attempted to do this yet. I have looked up this issue and the best thing to do is resize your photos but it’s too late for that as I’m already at 91% full and to resize I would have to download an app to resize photos and then upload from there ~ oh I’m already exhausted thinking about all the work I would have to do just to save space. I was paying which I gained more space but its dwindling away. I wish I could just delete old blog posts and photos to get the numbers down or to open up space but it doesn’t seem to work that way. I’ll keep researching, but I may need to start a new blog – and I will somehow link it to this one or let everyone know when that time comes.

I am looking forward to Spring and Summer this year and may try and work in the garden. I hope you all are having a wonderful weekend. Since I am going to link up with the #weekendcoffeeshare I want to thank Natalie for hosting! Thank you for following along in my journey, ya’ll mean a lot to me and I always love to share my adventures. Have a wonderful week ahead! ❤

Crazy Horse Loving Gal,

~Diana ❤