I had recently graduated college and was working full-time. A friend who lived in the area had bought a mare who was bred to a quarter horse and due in the spring of 2002. Gidget, the mare, was a registered stock paint mare; meaning that she was all solid in color. Her sire was San Juan, who (as I'm told) is well-known and successful in the show ring. Kathy had initial plans of keeping this foal, but then decided that owning a foal was probably not a good idea as she didn't have much motivation to work with the trained ones that she already owned! So I agreed that I would work with the foal and when the foal was three months old, I would decided whether or not to buy it. My thinking was that I was young, had a decent paying job and it was the right time to have a "baby".
On April 7, 2002, I got a call from Kathy whom proudly stated that when she had gone down to the barn that morning, she saw four eyes starting back at her instead of the usual two that belonged to the mare, Gidget. Apparently this little foal had been born sometime in the night and thankfully there were no complications from the unassisted birth and he was healthy... well, as a horse! Kathy's small farmette was located on my route to/from work, so on Monday afternoon I arrived at the farm to find a leggy, clumsy, palomino colt. He was adorable, but full of piss and vinegar right from the start! Constantly testing his mother, testing his handlers and anything else he could find! Kathy's husband Rich had decided that he looked like a "Jimmy" and promptly named him that. Since I was waiting until he was three months old to make a decision, I was stuck with "Jimmy" and Kathy decided on registering him as "Joeledo's Jim Dandy" with the American Paint Horse Association. The stallion is named Joeledojack and it is usually customary to somehow include the sire's name in the foal's registered name. I have to admit, "Jimmy" was not my first choice of names, so I started calling him "J.J."
Now I have worked with "green" horses before, meaning horses that did not know much under saddle. But to work with a weanling that knew nothing from the ground was a whole new experience. I had to first earn his trust, then teach him all the basics, wearing a halter, leading, letting me handle him on any part of his body. These are all things that I had previously taken for granted! And of course, this precocious little colt was stubborn about everything. While he was never mean-spirited, he seemed to always try to test the boundaries and have an opinion about everything. One of my favorite stories was when he was just days old, Kathy tried to move him out of the way by pushing his butt and when she turned around, he kicked her right in her butt! That was my little colt!
So when JJ was one, we moved to the Chicagoland area and he adjusted fairly well. I continued to do all of JJ's training myself, including longing, long-lining and tacking him up. When he was two years old I got on him and he was, surprisingly, very good about it. I started him very slowly, riding only five minutes at a time, twice per week. We gradually worked longer and more often, not trotting for the first three months and not cantering for the first six months. J was pretty darn good about it all! Around the time that he started cantering, I decided that I wanted to do eventing with him, which included dressage and jumping. We started to do the dressage work, but unfortunately my idea of dressage was the farthest thing from correct dressage and we made many mistakes. I took him to his first dressage schooling show when he was three yeas old and it was an absolute and complete failure. After coming back from this show, I knew that it was imperative to find a qualified instructor, as I was not going about this the correct way. I saw an ad in the IDCTA scribe for a trainer by the name of Shelley Day, whom advertised that she traveled to different barns. I started training with Shelley in the summer of 2006, when J was a little over 3 years old.
Shelley immediately saw all our training mistakes, although she was kind enough not to show her complete and utter horror! She immediately broke us down to the basics and basically started us all over again. It was very difficult to admit that I had it all wrong, but I immediately trusted Shelley and followed her instruction. Soon after I decided that eventing was not for us and I really enjoyed the intricacies of dressage and the harmony it created between horse and rider. In the fall of 2007, we moved to Indian Hills, which is the barn where Shelley kept her horse and she trained with Kim and Yvonne Barteau. Shelley's horse was a talented Trakener, whom I was lucky enough to get lessons on every once in awhile and lunge lessons. In those lunge lessons I learned how to effectively use my seat to half halt and collect a horse, which I will be forever grateful to Roscoe and Shelley. J (his name was by then shortened to) was making progress and we were working on training level work for the show season. J's attitude had changed however, he became fearful and inattentive, which I feared came from pushing him too hard, too young and incorrectly before we started with Shelley. But Shelley helped us work through it and helped me become a more confident rider. We soon started showing the little yellow horse...
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