Caber Contentment

Our first training show was a roaring success.
Charlie was spot-on for dressage, with a couple of stumbles in the grass, but otherwise a solid A.  Not an A+ - I couldn't get that last bit of sparkle out of him like he voluntarily brought at Rebecca, so I've got to keep working on that to figure out how to get him to volunteer it.
Our dressage ride gave us some breathing room to either be too slow or get a rail down in show jumping.
Cross country rode great.  Thank goodness John had me jump a lot of the fences last week without seeing them on the ground first; otherwise I would have psyched myself out.  There were three sets of A-B-C combinations (an up bank, down bank, skinny; a roll top, ditch, skinny; and a roll top; down bank into water; skinny roll top), and a table with a hard right to a narrow.  Although all the fences weren't perfect - Charlie had to save me on a couple - we rode the lines pretty much exactly as I envisioned and I had the speed spot on.  I measured by minutes instead of by fences, so I knew when my watch should go off at 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 and didn't have to look at it while we were going.  I also measured where to speed it up to make up for the places I had to slow it down.
It was so fun.
Then today I was super nervous since we seem to be weakest at show jumping and then the fences were freaking huge with hard turns to them to make it even harder.  Thank goodness there were just three sets of combinations, and none were triples.  I saw John while walking and he gave me some pointers, and then I just rode Charlie hard to each fence, thinking forward with my leg, but trying to use my seat and hands to lift him instead of hold him back.  In warm up and in the ring, he jumped everything like a champ, totally taking care of me.  We got one rail down, and John said we came out of that corner a little flat, but we rode the rest of it great.  I felt us bump a couple of rails, so we got really lucky, and we will really need to work on this over the winter.
It far exceeded my expectations and now I am really looking forward to working hard over the winter so we can stick with the accelerated schedule with my eye now on Prelim!!
Charlie is the best horse ever.