"The saddle... is... slippiiiiing!"

Whenever I have tried to canter on Ypke, it never goes quite as planned. It usually involves her being naughty because she knows she can intimidate me... or in this case, an unfortunate turn of events. In honor of "Flashback Friday," here is the tale of a very preventable fall that happened early last year.

Ypke isn't impressed with this story

Alas, some of you may remember the tales of the squeaky Wintec and I.  A trusty saddle, that is, until THAT day.  It started out like any other day... then my mom clipped the lungeline onto Ypke so that we could have a more or less safe controlled session.  I had only attempted to canter on her one other time, but she spooked, so I was excited to redeem myself.

Ypke did fantastic!  She has big gaits and is quite the mover, so I felt a little bit off balance at first. I got into the swing of things and had just said "HEY! THIS ISN'T SO BAD!" when it happened.

Squeak, squeak, squeakity-squeak

I had just seconds to scream "The saddle... is... SLIPPIIIIIIING!" before falling off and landing like a deformed pretzel. You know, the kind of pretzel that when kids see they holler, "Whoa, come look at this weird pretzel," and contemplate whether they should eat or save it.  Ypke immediately stopped and looked right down at me with her big brown eyes.  I looked up and the saddle was practically underneath her big ol' belly.

I didn't even attempt to slow her down when I felt the saddle was slipping, I just sat there and went with it.  It seemed more logical to scream that the saddle was slipping with dramatic pauses between the words than to actually do something about the matter.

The one time my mare actually had a good attitude about me cantering on her and I blew it.  The struggle.