Tuesday’s lesson was pretty great. We tackled the next part of the dressage program, which meant a corner, turning up onto the center line and a leg yield out to the side again.
Murphy was ... charged up. There’s definitely stuff going on in the herd, he was still rather feisty (got very close to taking a bite out of me on a few occasions, especially after the lesson when I saw teeth very close to my face :P), but he was also pretty eager to work. I got him fairly engaged from behind at an early stage, and the leg yields worked quite well at a walk. I think I did better this time at keeping my hands positioned right without getting too caught up in thinking about it.
Then we got to the trot, and it got a little trickier, partly because we were actually too many during the lesson due to a mix-up in booking reserves. Even though Murphy isn’t exactly a big mover, he does cover a fair bit of ground when he starts using his hindquarters and I can’t quite manage to collect all that extra drive to make it go more upwards instead of more forward. I got some nice lateral movement, but I also got a lot of little stops and starts as he just wasn’t able to fit in.
And at one point we had a close encounter with Hedvig’s behind. Hedvig is a new pony, and she apparently has a temper, because that behind flew up very high in the air. She’s gorgeous, though. A rather small representative of the North Swedish Horse, almost entirely black and with a stunning mane and tail. Apparently Murphy has a thing for her, heh. Fortunately, he mostly concentrated on work during the class, and I was pretty happy with the end result. But when I do manage to get him engaged from the start I need to get better at not letting the energy just rush on forward.