Sunny at the Bombproofing Clinic

I missed talking about Sunny at the bombproofing clinic in November, and then last weekend we took Riot to another one! So I figured I'd talk about Sunny in this post, then talk about Riot tomorrow and then the following week, we'll talk about TC, who is going to one next weekend!

Good pony!

So, I love TC to death but I do have to admit that he is now so bombproof and so chill that I find him a bit boring. Don't get me wrong, I adore him and the fact that I now have a horse I can walk around bareback in a hackamore on in the dark even when he's had two weeks off makes me very very happy. 

But when the bombproofing clinic people said they'd be doing three mini clinics this winter, I knew that I didn't want to bring TC to all of them. I wanted a bit more of a challenge. So I asked my mom if I could bring her pony, Sunny. 

Sunny is a good boy, but he makes my mom a bit nervous sometimes. It's not that he's super spooky or anything, he just *does* spook, unlike TC at this point who just looks at stuff curiously unless he's been recently poked with needles. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone and ride something that actually spooks while also helping my mom out. She came out with me to see how he was and I made her bring her riding stuff just in case!

Noodles are sketchy

A bit worried about the monkey

Sunny unloaded just fine and was great walking over to the arena, but once inside he was a little bit overwhelmed. The instructor knew that I knew what I was doing with the bombproofing stuff (since I've come to most of their clinics in the last few years), so she said that if I just wanted to start, that would be fine and to let her know if I had any issues that she could help with. 

I started with walking Sunny over the bridge, since he's done a lot of trail riding and would probably find that one easy. He did and we then walked over to the monkey in the barrel, which he absolutely hated. It was in this moment that I realized how unbelievably good TC really is at this point. He doesn't even flinch when the monkey pops up even if it bonks him in the head. Sunny stood pretty far back from it and was ready to leave. 

We worked on it a little bit but my main goal was to find out what he was okay with after a couple of times and then let my mom get on him and do those things. So we moved on to the car wash. I made the mistake of pointing him at it against the wind, so it blew up in his face and he went to spin. We re-approached from the other direction and slowly made our way under it. He zipped through twice and then decided it was pretty boring. We then went back the scary direction and he was fine! Good pony. 

Not a fan of mattresses

Testing it out

After that, he wouldn't walk through the water, so we skipped that and worked on the mattress. He was weird about it at first but then relaxed and walked over that. The tarp went about the same as the car wash, with him refusing to go over it on the side that was a bit windy but being fine to go over it from the other side. 

The noodle wall confused the hell out of him. He didn't think he could walk through it because the noodles were in the way. So we moved the wall out to make it wider and he skirted through it a couple of times before I grabbed a noodle and bopped it all over him, then he seemed a bit more comfortable. We went through it a bunch and eventually he was okay about going through it. 

The last thing we did was pull a little kid's car thing around. He was really quite good about that, which is fabulous because he's supposed to be a good grandchildren's horse for my parents and he will need to tolerate that kind of stuff!

Learning to be a good grandchild horse

Gotta get used to bears too

My mom got on him after that and we went through all the exercises he was good about with me. She walked him over the bridge, through the box of garbage, under the car wash, across the mattress and the tarp, and through the noodle wall. Throughout the ride, my mom went from being very nervous and holding onto her grab strap and the reins for stability/control to riding around on a loose rein with her phone out taking video of Sunny doing all the obstacles. 

From there, we went on a walk around the whole property and Sunny was a good boy walking around. He even did a bunch of the trail course obstacles and walked around the field quietly. We would have loved to do more with him, but he's pretty out of shape and two hours in, he was exhausted. So my mom took him home after that. 

Tarp walker

It was SUCH a fun day. I loved having more of a challenge to work with through the obstacles so that I don't lose my touch with spooky horses. I think it'll be good to take Sunny and eventually Riot to these to work on my own bombproofing-ness so that I'm better prepared for my future horse. 

I also really loved seeing my mom have so much fun and gain confidence. She hasn't been riding much this year due to the virus and how insane everything has been. Without riding, she loses confidence and then it becomes really hard to start up again. So this was the perfect way to show her how good Sunny is and how she can trust him at home where there aren't any crazy things going on. 

We talked about getting her over to my barn with him to walk around and introduce Sunny to TC and then the two of us can start going on trail rides again. My mom FINALLY trusts TC and my assertation that TC is literally the most bombproof horse I've ever had (she thinks Rico "exudes calmness" and always trusted him but she knew TC when he was an idiot). So hopefully we can trail ride in the spring together! And if Sunny is bad, she can always hop on TC. I don't think she ever thought she'd ride him!