Lead Changes

I had a lovely lesson on Rileigh early this morning. I'm very thankful my trainer was able to work me into her busy schedule on relatively short notice. The jumps weren't too high, under 3' for the most part I think, but we did some "scary" ones. A brightly painted swedish, a skinny, fences w/ rainbow fillers and pine tree fillers. Riles didn't bat an eye at any of it ...except a cavaletti on the ground next too a fairly plain and boring vertical. The cavaletti in question was lighter coloured than all the others, so I guess to Rileigh that made it terrifying; he threw quite the fit the first time we had to go closely around it up to a jump.
He was very good though.

Toward the end of the lesson we worked on lead changes, something that Riles has only been introduced to very recently. His left-to-right flying changes are coming along quite nicely, they're getting fairly smooth and easy under the right circumstance. The right-to-left changes however, need a lot of work. He changed late behind almost every time onto the left today, w/ a lot of dramatic flinging his body around. We ended on a good note w/ a nice change onto the left lead though. I expect it will come more easily w/ time; the left is his more difficult direction anyway, so it makes sense that he'd have more trouble figuring out the change from right to left.