We continued to build upon past lessons. Kid 3 needs to do A LOT of yielding the forequarters with Xoe. She tend to be very pushy with her front end, particularly on her right side. If you watch closely, you'll see that in today's video.
Friday it rained most of the day. I had been planning to introduce the tarp to Xoe, but she really didn't like my raincoat, so we focused on that instead. My raincoat's full of horse hair now, but Xoe is much more tolerant of plastic snapping. By the end, Kid 3 was able to drape the raincoat over Xoe's back.
Saturday night my sister-in-law & family spent the night at our place as they traveled from North Dakota to California. They had purchased a lot of fireworks, so all of my horses got desensitized to loud noises. The older horses settled down fairly quickly after the first several explosions, but Xoe was pretty anxious all night, maybe because we also had a bonfire in the fire pit that is adjacent to her pen.
After we finished making loud noises with the firecrackers, eight out of the nine of us (Kid 1's been down and out with a fever that reached 103 deg. at one point) crowded around our campfire to roast marshmallows. Xoe didn't seem to like our flashlights, either. She ended up getting a lot of exercise racing back and forth in her pen. I haven't seen her pace that much since the first couple days she was here. I bet she slept good once we finally went inside!
I only made it out on Friday to video, so all you get to see this week is me coaching Kid 3 through a part of a session on desensitizing to the raincoat and Kid 3 picking up Xoe's feet.
Kid 3 is pretty good with a trained horse, but she has never worked with an untrained horse before. For exercises that she doesn't really know or feel confident about, I will often do one side and allow Kid 3 to do the other side. That allows her to, first, see how to the exercise, and second, it gives her an idea of how strongly Xoe might react to a new stimulus. That way it minimizes surprises that might lead to injury.