Bright Star Ranch

Last week, we got some new props and began to desensitize Simon to a few of them. The first one took him some time to get used to and go through, but with patience and the right teaching methods, he did go through it several times! 🎉

Next, we took the SAME prop and turned it on its side. All of the sudden, we were back to square one. Simon refused to go through it and needed to start the process over.

It's funny how looking at something from a different perspective can make you feel completely different about a situation. In this case, the change in perspective made him feel uncomfortable, unsafe, etc. But sometimes, when we will simply look at something from a different perspective, we can gain a better understanding and therefore relate to people in a way that wasn't possible before.

We wrapped up the last day of our camp season today and had fun doing it! We got to play with the new props that the crew from Mortenson made for us last night.

The first two pics show a couple of ways we can use the two stands they made. But, there are actually SO many more ways that you'll see us use these in the future because they're very versatile! It took a few minutes to desensitize Simon to it but he went through it multiple times ...until we put the stands down horizontally. That's going to be another desensitizing session. 🤣

He warmed up to the bridge pretty quickly and when we added the ground pole for the seesaw effect, he handled it like a champ!

We now have 12 cavalettis to create a variety of ground pole obstacles and there's even a 5 ft tall mailbox that the participants can "drive" right up to during lessons.

It's like Christmas around the ranch!

This evening, we had a group of people from Mortenson, who are working at the Meta data center site, come out to the ranch and build some new props for us! They asked us for some suggestions and made it happen. It was great meeting such nice people with awesome talents and seeing them use those talents to help others in the community. We can't thank them enough for their generosity. Just know that everything will be well used!

We can't wait to reveal what all was made to our campers tomorrow and then share with everyone else. So stay tuned...

The last camp that we do is for some of the kids who have been to camp multiple years in a row. One of these campers has been to camp EVERY year that we've had one!

We like being able to teach more in depth horsemanship skills to them after they've established a great base with the other camps. Today, we were thankful the rain held off for the most part!

And we can always count on Chi to flirt with the girls. 😍

Chi joined us for the last day of camp 2. Although I'm sure he prefers being the greeter, he did a great job with the leading exercises today. He especially liked the treats afterwards!😋

Of course, Freedom always enjoys a good spa day before the rides begin!