Feb update

Time to give everyone another update from the sunny south, training has been progressing nicely with all the horses, we've given Nico a small break this last week as he had been doing so well in his training and then his body started to feel like it needed a bit of a rest, as trainers we have to listen to our horses even if it means delaying our plans for the week so we've backed off him a little bit to let him have a rest and will start to build his work back up again soon, this is always the hard part of training horses we have in mind the schedule we want our training to be on but we have to listen to the horse first and not be overeager and it's important that when our horses tell us they need more time that we respect that and don't put our plans ahead of their needs.  Landino is rolling along with things, I've been continuing to try to expose him to things out here as the more exposure he gets the more he settles in, he's a very rational horse in that regard, he might be a bit nervous and tentative at first but once he knows he's okay then he's settled and ready to go.  We took him out to his second show at the Jim Brandon last weekend again doing two Third Level tests to get him around the ring confidently, the first day he was a very good boy and he earned his very first 10 which was very neat and the second day he also tried very hard, had a mistake in the first medium trot but also had some very nice moments, 9s for half passes and a score of 72% to win his class, overall I really can't complain about that at all!  Miss Ocita is also progressing very nicely, she is starting to understand more and more how to start to close up her body more and use her back and topline a bit better, I've had some moments where I start to feel her lifting through the back and shoulders and can feel where this will develop into something very expressive down the road, it really doesn't matter what level the horse is it's always exciting for me when they start to have break throughs and you can feel them start to understand the pieces, anyhow that's the update for now and thanks to my clients who have sent me videos the last bit I've got a few of them on my list to get to so I promise I will get to them ASAP and send you all feedback, nice to keep in touch with everyone and see how you're all doing back home:)