Moving On?

Well it didn't go quite as planned, but it felt a lot better today. Dressage and stadium were really smooth. I rode him without the curb chain when jumping today...although I don't think that had anything to do with the incident last weekend. Anyway, the jumps seemed really, really easy for him and he wasn't too challenged at all. He was somewhat back to himself on XC...he wasn't attacking the fences, but I want to believe that that's because he didn't really have to try. But he was galloping straight, not pinning his ears, and not wobbling, so I think it was good. So we didn't get to finish XC though because he wouldn't go over a fairly nasty, dark ditch all by itself. I'm not sure if it was the ditch, or the half of a manequin sitting in one corner of the ditch. I think he caught a glimpse of that and spooked and stopped. Then I rushed the reapproach twice for two more stops and then I trotted him at it and he took it fine. When he does stop if I whip him and try and chase him he just gets mad and refuses to go forward. I need to learn a lesson from that and just be gentle with him...it's tough because I really don't have too much reinforcement if he's not going since the whip has the opposite effect on him in that he fights it by backing off more. So we didn't get to school the water, but he definitely was more like himself. We will be XC schooling this week before Danny heads to Mass. and then deciding what the show plan is for the next month or so...