Showing posts with label vaccinations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vaccinations. Show all posts

May 18, 2015

Post-Vaccination Rides

Connor had a swelling the size of my hand around the vaccine site when I went out on Thursday.  No temperature, heat or pain, so I cold hosed it and prepared to tell my trainer it needed to be a light lesson.

She ended up wanting to make it our last training ride, so that she could show me exactly what she's been doing with him and what the differences are between the way she rides and the way I ride.  He wasn't sore, but was definitely lethargic, so the ride didn't last long and she promised me a makeup as a result.
This is the site on Sunday after cold hosing, swelling has gone down quite a bit.

She did get the following points across:
- I should not ever lean my torso back and set my back against him.
- At the same time, he easily tosses me around into a less effective position, and I need to counter that by being firm in my abs/lower back/upper pelvis region.  I'm good at sitting up straight, but bad at "weighting" that straight position in my lower body.
- I should never pull back in my elbow, but instead use shorter reins/fingers for aids.
- I should never take my hands away from his neck, they need to stay in a box in front of the saddle.

And we had a fantastic ride on Sunday in which I put all that into practice.  Lately, I go into each ride thinking "I am GOING to get this horse on my aids," and I do.  It's a departure from my mindset in rides in the past, where I would get on my crooked, ADHD horse and not feel like I knew how to get good work out of him.

In other weekend news, I had some pretty fantastic blogger houseguests at the Hoosier Horse Park Hotel (aka my house) this weekend, but I'll let them out themselves!  I have a standing offer to friends for free housing, my husband's delicious cooking, and alcohol, if any of you are ever showing at the HHP and would like to save money on hotel/food.  We love having people over!

Dressage at 9:30am on a Sunday makes him yawn.

May 13, 2015

Sick Days and Vaccinations

I somewhat inexplicably contracted strep throat and spent the last two days home sick.  The best nurse dog ever helped me through it, though.



And besides, it gave me some much needed time to take my final pictures of my house in its current state and get packing.  Going to miss this little house, but I'm looking forward to working on the next one!  



So I ran out to the barn when I was starting to feel better and gave Connor his spring vaccine.  I went with Vetera Gold XP this year, which I have never used before, but the vet recommended it for the particular strains of equine influenza it protects against based on what's going around this year.  It's like the human flu shot, where they guess what strains will be most prevalent and make the vaccine to reflect that guess.  

I guess my logic was that I wasn't up to riding, so he shouldn't be either?  I gave him his shot and handwalked him for 10 minutes after to try to mitigate soreness as much as I could, then turned him back out to move around.



In the meantime, we're planning our next event, which looks to be Midsouth at KHP in June, preceded by a schooling show and XC schooling.  Anyone going to that?