Sweltering Gracefully

Or not, as it may be. 31 degrees today, and not a single cloud in the sky. Not even those little puffy white ones. Of course, this made riding Smarts and Hollie wonderful. Thankfully they were both pretty responsive to my leg, so I was not dying at the end of the lesson.
Since Charlie is assuming that we are fairly confident on horse control now, we are moving on to more technical stuff - diagonals and leading legs without looking, extension/collection and schooling traits of these delightful little ponies. Today, we were extending the canter stride as far as possible, and I was pretty happy when we swapped horses halfway through and I got Hols. Warming up Smartie is pretty easy, but warming up Hollie is a bit of an uphill struggle. However I try, she just seems dead to my leg and whip. But since she had already been warmed up, her trot was fairly easy to get going, and really awesome compared to her prior efforts. Her canter was also rather lovely, and instead of thundering towards Smartie's arse like I though she would, she actually had a lovely working canter. Charlie said that since the horses hadn't been schooled particularly brilliantly, they would probably not understand what we were asking them to do, but Hollie actually responded with about 3 strides of a floaty, elevated and prolonged canter stride, before nearly running into a hedge. Problem with me is, I forget what I'm doing when something good happens. Usual consequence - bolting, bucking, crashing, generic falling flat on my butt. Fun times though :)
After this, we did a couple of the old turns on the forehand, which Smarts is surprisingly good at. But before we could turn, Charlie made us get them square in front. I was just trying to nudge his front leg into action, but Charlie told me that I needed to lean slightly off his leg that I wanted to move in order to get a response. It really works! I never would have worked that out in a thousand years, and all this new stuff makes me want to become the best rider I can possibly be. I'm trying to get in some more riding over the summer by convincing my parents to let me share a horse about 3 times a week. £27 isn't a bad deal for three to four rides per week, hey?
I can't wait for tomorrow. New horses to ride! Yaaaaaay!
See y'all soon :)