Hello!

Welcome to Pony Steps, here you will find support, advice and real life stories for beginner parents navigating the pony world with their children, offering tips on riding schools, pony sharing, and even bet on to pony ownership.

The start of our story

I rode as a child; I had the odd riding lessons here and there and we had friends who had horses. I loved the smell of the tack room, that was my favourite memory; I suppose if someone had asked me as I was growing up, I would have said, had I the language, that I loved the idea of horse ownership but of course that was way out of my league.

Family and friends laughed at me as a kid for having an electric bum, unwittingly causing a horse to bolt whenever I got on. I struggled with being teased as a child, and on reflection, albeit unintentionally, the teasing caused me more anxiety and stress and thus the horses were nervous when I rode making my ‘electric bum’ a living reality. I felt a lingering sense of not being good enough that wrote me off as ever having any meaningful connection with horses, and certainly never owning a pony; that would have been out of the question had I even thought of the question, which I didn’t.

Then along came my eldest daughter Emma, from a tiny age she adored horses and longed to ride, my husband and I vividly recall at 3 or so she was riding a pony around a tiny circle at a fair in Switzerland with the happiest smiles on her face. As she got older so grew her desire to ride and so our journey began. As many other parents, we found ourselves in a world we understood little about, and we were all at sea. This story shares our journey from riding lessons to pony sharing to eventual ownership. All of these are a destination in themselves, and I will be sharing the joy and the trials of all of them and most importantly how to go about it. So how did our pony journey with Emma unfold?