Exuberance and Dominance

I played with Belle today and it definitely was an interesting session. I had my grandma come out with me with the Puzzles booklet and pick out puzzles for me to do.
We did:
Porcupine, Zone 3, Hula Hoop: rather easy, just porcupined her front legs inside the hula hoop
Sideways, Zone 4, Log: I just had her sideways with her butt next to a pole. It wasn't too bad.

Then I started to do some figure 8 with barrels. Belle decided she did NOT want to send to the right. Absolutely was not going to. and when Belle doesn't want to, she throws a fit. She reared more than 10 times during this session. I ignored it and just kept asking her to circle to the right. She also coupled this rearing with pawing and general Belle-spaz-ness. As soon as she went right, i released.

By the end I got some good circles with her going over the barrels, and mostly staying on the circle, which is hard for her, because she thinks that after she jumps she has to face me because of playing the squeeze game so much. Even got some OK circles to the right with the jump.
So back to my title:
Exuberance- Belle is the horse who loves to destroy things, loves to run around and be showy, does 'star jumps all the time, and is generally just rather exuberant. Belle loves life.
Dominance- Coupled with this exuberance is slight dominance. She throws her ears back A LOT when doing change of directions and other little things, so I "wipe the look off her face" with a phase 4. When I do this, she definitly puts her ears forward, but being so sensitive, she hugely overreacts to it.

I know Belle gets better the more I play with her, and I have to keep reminding myself that I haven't been playing with her consistently at all lately. I really like this horse, she's gorgeous, smart, charismatic, good conformation, all of that.. but I definitly have a fear of being on her back that I need to overcome. and thats really hard when she's still super green. But I think I can do it.

Hello

So this is my first blog. Yay. I think having somewhere to write(type) what I'm thinking will be good, and help my track my progress with the horses and with myself.
Speaking of horses, this is where I stand with them right now:

Okie- Starting some lv.2 ground skills, sideways without fence and change of directions and transistions online. He's coming along really nicely after his winter off due to lameness. Once the weather clears up for good, I'm going to start him on a conditioning program of some kind. I'm hoping to this summer work something out with Angie so I can board Okie there and work off board. That way, I'd be able to ride him everyday in the arena that has good footing.

Belle- oh, my little problem child. Belle is definitly my "allure" right now. She is a huge LBE that is also really sensitive and the combo of that makes her rather difficult at times. Once our arena gets done (should be within a couple of weeks) I'm going to start playing more with saddling, mounting and short riding sessions to build up my confidence. I think Belle is going to be a super horse, she can be a super horse, it's just my confidence and lack of stick-to-it-ness that holds me back.

Horse searching- ..is not fun. I haven't had any serious leads yet. I've seen a couple horses that I liked, but they weren't exactly what I want/need. There was one horse that we totally would have bought if he had been certain about his age and didn't have a "diet problem". I used to love searching dreamhorse and now I'm not liking it as much anymore. Its old after awhile.