As I mentioned yesterday, Sunday was ADVENTURE TIME with the boys. I’m really loving the rare weekend days where I have nothing to do but play around with these two idiots.

I took much the same approach this weekend as I did last weekend. We started out with ponying – which Presto has gotten a little bit cocky about as of late. I think he finds it to be a really fun game, and he’s not intimidated by anything at all, so sometimes he tries to nip at Henry or canter in place. He’s funny though, in all of his antics he never actually pulls on the lead rope. He’s just really excited to be there, bro.

Originally I had wanted to just do a nice long walk on the hills, but Mr. CanterOnTheSpot had ants in his pants, so we went for a big long trot lap of the entire field first. That 10 minutes was enough to take a lot of the cockiness out of him, after which we were able to settle and walk, with a few bits of stopping to practice standing still (Henry’s favorite – Presto’s least favorite).

I brought them back in and decided to chop both of their manes off, then it was bath time again. Henry is trying his hardest to do his “I don’t have hair here or here or here” summer routine, so I’ve been keeping after him daily with my variety of shampoos and tinctures. Presto has stayed funk-free so far (he’s fading into a buckskin really quickly in the summer sun though, which is sad) so he just got hosed off and then had to stand in the wash rack and wait politely while I attended to Henny. And when I say “wait politely” I mean wait not-at-all-politely, as he proceeded to try to very deliberately stomp on the hose for the next 15 minutes.

Since Henry kind of ruined courtyard grazing privileges last weekend with his attempted escape (why do they take turns being brats?), I stuck them into the little front paddock with the citrus trees. I took Henry’s lead rope off but left Presto’s on at first, to continue his lessons with the drag rope while I supervised.

As soon as I let them go I could see the mischievousness in Henry’s eyes. Sometimes he just gets that cheeky look about him where you can tell he’s just waiting for the right excuse to be naughty. But they both just walked off and started grazing, and I figured maybe I was wrong.

I was not wrong.

A few minutes later Henry spotted the chickens, and that was exactly the excuse he’d been looking for. He took off bucking and leaping and galloping and squealing and farting. Poor Presto was tagging behind like “Oh, are we spooking? FUN!”, while Henry proceeded to run around like a rodeo horse for the next 10 minutes. Even Presto got tired of his shenanigans and tried to go back to grazing, but Henry would come blazing past him again and Presto would have to duck and cover to get out of the way.

I decided to rescue Presto a little bit and at least take the drag rope off, since he already had enough problems with his idiot brother the bucking bronco.

Presto alternately chased him and then got chased, but he kept it mostly to a trot, because he’s never impressed. It was almost like they were playing tag.

I eventually had to stop their game and take them in, because Henry was getting a little TOO rambunctious. Total idiot, I dunno what wild hair got up his butt. Clearly being ridden 6 days a week with a ramped up conditioning schedule isn’t taking anything out of him. Not feeling particularly guilty about the summer horse shows anymore.

When I put Presto back in his pasture he tried his best to continue the game of tag with his donkeys, but they were 0% interested.

Watching Henry and Presto interact definitely brings me a lot of joy, even when one of them looks like a coked out dolphin and the other is a baby giraffe. Life is never boring with these two!