Moseying from Woody's Back

Today when I went out to the barn to see Woody, he and Charlotte greeted me at the fence like they always do. He followed me up to the barn where we just hung out and I read a magazine. After a while of doing that I put his halter on from the chair and wanted to see if he remembered our sideways lesson from the other day. We went to the bucket against the barn and he side-passed over it as if he'd done it a million times before! Once I gave him a little handful of hay, I asked him to go over the one that was not near the barn. He went sideways over it with little prompting from me and then turned a looked at me like, "What kind of treat does THAT earn me?" I laughed and gave him a good scratching after that, and when I stopped he blew from his nose and shook his whole body. I put his lead rope on the ground and went to get my bareback pad to saddle him up. Once it was on, we played a little circle game, and I began to notice his expression was pretty ugly. I changed his direction and when he did that he threw a snotty look in with it and I jerked on the lead rope and told him to wipe that look off his face. After 2 more times of doing this he stopped and looked at me with his ears up and licking and chewing. When I sent him on the circle again his look was much different so I disengaged him and brought him in.
After I checked his girth and mounted up, we just sat there for a looooong time. I tried to reach his belly to find an itchy spot, but I couldn't reach. I then rode him over to hang out under to big trees, and I noticed that he was craning his neck to reach to leaves in the tree. I could reach them easily, so I pulled some off and gave them to him. After a while of doing that I decided to go over to the round pen and just sit over there, so we rode all the way across the pasture to hang out by the round pen. There is a lot of grass in there, so I opened the gate and we went in there for a little bit. On either side of the round pen there are big tufts of grass that the horses like to eat at, so I decided to play some point to point with the grass. After 5 or 6 seconds at one grass spot. I would pick my life and his head up and walk over to the other one. It didn't take him long to figure it out and once he did there was no stopping him! One time when he was on his way to a grass spot he practically cantered over to it. I then thought it would be good to change it up a little bit. On one side of the round pen there were 6 barrels standing up, so rather than ask him to run from one side to the other to get grass, I asked him to weave in and out of the barrels and practice what I did during my lesson with Terrie. After doing that a couple of times, we left the round pen and went to get a drink of water. Mom came out to give Charlotte a bath, so we went to close the round pen gate and then I dismounted and gave him a cookie.
Once I let him go after hosing I tried to get him to back up by putting gradual pressure on his tail. And he did it! It the perfect end of a great day.
Things to work on: prepare for possibly filming my Level 1 Assessment tomorrow!
~Eden