The new girth works great. I still had to hook it up to almost the smallest hole though! Zeus is not very big around, but now that he's been wormed, hopefully he should start to fill out a bit.
Zeus is kind of a lazy horse on the sliding scale of "laziness" versus "psycho-I'm-going-to-run-away-with-you-at-any-moment" type of horse. I kind of like that. It's easier to apply pressure as needed to get him into the desired gait than it is to try to convince a hot and nervous horse to calm down/slow down.
He is a little prone to sulling up (not wanting to move when asked), but he's starting to get over that. It helped to loosen up his feet when we were able to move outside to the small pasture. He's got the idea now of going forward, so I was able to work on controlling direction a bit today. We did some circles and figure 8s and worked a little on yielding the hind and forequarters. He is really soft when asked to back up.
So far I'm having him wear the bit, but I'm just riding with a halter and lead rope. Once he has a feel for following direction, I'll hook up the reins to the bit--probably next week since we are starting to run out of time. Zeus is only here for 30 days instead of the usually 60 since he had some exposure to "pony rides" last fall.
The videos are from Saturday. He is doing even better now. It makes me want to do the video over!