Maiden flight - doing alright

We have a swallows nest in our barn, it's on one of the beams above Remys stable. There are 4 youngsters in it. It seems like it's been no time at all, but today the first one left the nest and made it's maiden flight. It was wonderful to watch. It flew around the barn, unsure of itself, mum (or dad) hovering nearby and then flying in and out of the barn trying to guide it. It wanted to get back into the nest, but couldn't work out the logistics. It was flying and hovering, flying and hovering, trying to work out how to do it. Isn't nature amazing - within a few short weeks those wings will be powerful enough to fly for hundreds of miles. Eventually it flew out of the dark, dusty barn into bright, glorious sunshine and circled high above. I wonder what it was thinking at that moment, how it felt leaving the dark safety of the nest and going into the bright open space of a whole new world .
I rode Remy up to the school for a short session. He wasn't paying much attention today, wanting to look around. He's been very jumpy the last couple of days and although he was calmer today he was still quite distracted. I walked him on a long rein for a few minutes, letting him stretch and relax and then worked on some halt/walk/halt transitions. He was sticky giving me right flexion so finished by asking for flexion left then right at halt for a few minutes until he was offering from a light feel on the rein.
As it's been a while, I thought it would be nice to take him up the track so thats what we did. We were out for about 30 minutes, went as far as the road and he gave me a lovely, long, forward stride on the way home.

Gareth came to trim them yesterday so they're fine for another few weeks and he's happy with how they're coping with the very hard ground.

Also, our hay was baled yesterday. In the words of our farmer - 'catastrophe!'
Over the last few years we've had between 35and 45 large round bales of our two main fields and this year we got 10. Unfortunately for us we let the farmer have our other field for maize so we're missing the hay off there too.
Thanks to good friends who've offered us some hay I think we'll be ok, but I can understand how farmers are worrying with large herds of cows to feed.
This spring we've had extremely dry weather and having so little hay is unusual, but our fields need some attention and we plan to reseed at the end of this year, so they'll be in much better condition next year.