Horse Therapy - week 2
Last week was just a bunch of paperwork regarding medical stuff, insurance, waiving liability and such (which when you fill out for 6 people can take some time) and "meeting" the horses. First, we started off with a trek to the barn, grabbed 3 horses, walked them down the hill (or they walked the kids down the hill after many stops for bites of grass) and let them go in the arena.
Today, we had our first 2 "exercises". The first one just involved gathering the 3 recently released horses, putting on halters and lead ropes and taking them around the arena. Of course there is no instructions given to the kids on how to accomplish this. They are left to figure it out on their own.
The second exercise involved us all holding hands - in any order. We happened to line up with Ryan and I in the middle. So he was "the Brain" for Jacob and Wes, who were standing on my side and I was "the Brain" for Carly and Bill, who were standing on Ryan's side. Nobody but Ryan or I were allowed to speak and we could only speak to our "brain" side. So he was in charge of directing Jacob and Wes and vice versa. Nobody was allowed to move without direction and you were not allowed to drop hands or speak. If you did, there were immediate consequences (you had to do 3 jumping jacks).
Anyhoo - our job was to direct our line of people over to the end of the arena, corral a horse and get a lead rope, a blanket and a saddle on the horse, without dropping hands and with only Ryan and me giving verbal directions. It was hard for him to understand exactly what he was supposed to be doing and as much as he liked the idea of bossing Jacob and Wesley around, he really couldn't pull it off very well. I had to ask him leading questions, such as "What do you think you need to tell them? How are they going to pick it up? Things like that.
But we got it done. The blanket was put on upside down initially, but once I pointed out that the side they had "up", was covered in horse hair and perhaps it was normally against the horse, they worked together to get it flipped and positioned correctly.
