Harder Memorial Show

On Saturday we attended the Harder Memorial Show in Milton-Freewater, Oregon.  It was a nice sunny and warm day!
                                    
The day before the show, I gave Tommy a bath - and boy did he ever shine!  I bought him a new full body lime green "jammie-jam" to condition his coat with, and also purchased some sparkley spray at the local tack store and put the glittery stuff in his mane and tail.  He looked really spiffy!  My green saddle blanket is reversible, so I decided to go with the other side which is an aqua blue.  Gotta change the colors up a bit once in awhile....  =:) 

We competed in many classes throughout the day.  The showmanship class was huge, with around 15 entrants with all kinds of horses.  There were Mini's, Welsh Ponies, QH's, Paints, Appies, Arabs, a Morgan, a Kiger, and a Friesian!  (The friesian was awesome, he could rear and bow on command.)  We managed to place third in showmanship - which was great. 

We started the day out in a big showmanship class and then progressed into halter and english.  Tommy really improved in the english this time.  I used my stupid little flat huntseat saddle and relaxed the best that I could in it.  The judge asked us to drop our irons in the english Championship class - and I almost panicked a little bit - but took a deep breath and did it.  (Luckily she didn't ask us to pick the irons back up at the trot or else I would've probably bounced right off...)   But we did alright, and I was very pleased with Tommy's progress.

Craig caught a ride over with a friend after he got off of work in the afternoon, so there are only a few pictures of us in the western events.  I tried to get some photos in the morning, but was too busy shuttling back and forth into the arena for classes...

                                        
Tommy has also made some great improvement with collection and his headset at the lope (pictured above).  We've really been working our butts off to try and get a nice collected "slow" lope with good strike-offs and maintaining collection.  He is still a little sporatic on the head collection at times, but it's a huge improvement from where we were 6 months ago.  Slowly but surely...

But I was pretty proud of him for doing as well as he did!  We managed to earn over a dozen ribbons and a nice heavy glass mug filled with horsey treats.  =:)  The boy did mighty good throughout day.

And we also earned the Reserve High Point!  The girls from the Pioneer Posse rodeo court presented us with a nice big pretty purple and red reserve ribbon. 

I wasn't aware that they had high point awards at this show, so I was rather surprised when my name was called over the loud speaker to report to the arena after the show was over.  (Craig and I had loaded Tommy up in the trailer and were about to head home just before I heard my name called.)  When I got up to the office, Shane Laib told me to go and get my horse so that they could take a picture.  I said, "why?", and he informed me that we had came in 2nd place for the high point.  It was a great surprise and I was totally thrilled!  I had no idea that we were even in the running for that.  So we unloaded Tommy and had our picture taken with the "tough enough to wear pink" rodeo/ring steward girls.

It was a fun day, and I'm already looking forward for our next show!  =:)