Right on

Since my last post I have done more work with Tumbleweed. I had a friend over to hold him in halter while I finished trimming his mama. Dave is 80 years old now, and he is a good hand- gentle but not a pushover. He grew up with horses on the farm and has lots of stories about those days. He loves coming over to help out with the horses. At first Tumbleweed objected to having the halter on, he was all over the pen until Dave ran the lead rope around his butt. It had the usual calming effect and to make things easier we took him into the stall and I trimmed his mama just outside the stall.
It had been about a week since I had done much with him, so I figured it was a good idea to do more daily work with him. The next day I haltered him and mama and led them out on grass. He is pretty good when he is with her, I guess it just makes sense to him to follow her.
The following day they got turn out; I don't turn them out on rainy days but it had dried up enough to let them loose.

I wish I had started the video a little quicker as he did a sliding stop and roll back right in front of me. He's an agile little guy!

Today I stepped it up a bit and caught him and worked in the pen without having mama haltered too. It was pretty obvious that he is a left sided horse, he wanted nothing to do with seeing me out of his right eye. So... guess what we worked on....  I spent about 15 minutes working with him, used the butt rope so he couldn't just back away from me, or his other favourite trick of putting his head up and swinging his butt to me while stiffening his neck. Once he was calm about me being on the right and leading him from the right, and standing quietly, I turned him loose. 

Then this evening at chore time, I caught him again just to make sure that he had absorbed the things we worked on earlier..

And look at that... he remembered and was pretty much good with it, except for the little backing up spree. It is so important to use the butt rope with foals when they don't quite get things, it seems to connect their body to their brain. You don't need to keep it on the whole time, just enough to get them thinking.
I have filed his registration now, should get his papers in a couple of weeks. It took a while to capture that 3/4 pose they want for the papers but I think I nailed it with this photo:

It's probably the one that will go on his papers. I am excited to see what his colour will look like once he sheds all that baby fuzz! You can see hints of the dark from his knees down and the wither patch of darker hair. The leg stripes are faint right now, hopefully they will be more visible once he sheds out, probably around August.