Jon and Amber

Just a little update on the tragedy of the falling tomatoes.

I had watered the plants on Friday morning, and discovered them on the ground this morning, so I suspect they fell during some rainstorms that hit while I was at work on Friday, which means they probably spent many lonely hours crashed on the ground. If I had managed to find them sooner, I may have been able to do some patching.

Since these BeefSteak hybrids are a determinate variety of tomatoes, I don’t have high hopes for the mostly-dead plant which was only left with one tiny little branch. If they were indeterminate, I would be more optimistic, but I just don’t know what to expect right now.

As for the tougher of the two fall victims, it suffered a second fall before this evening was over. Jon was attaching some strong ropes to the buckets in order to re-hang them, and accidentally knocked them off their temporary perches. This fall was much more damaging to the plant I was hoping would be making a strong recovery; it sustained some very ugly breakage at the base of the stem. (I was too shocked/sad to take a picture of the injury, but it was very bad.) However, I did get a picture of the bandage that I fashioned out of duct tape:

And of course, not long after I finished the patching, the thunderstorms and tornado warnings started rolling through our area. Jon moved the whole rig up against the southeast wall of the garage for me, but I won’t know how they’ve fared the storms until tomorrow morning. The suspense is terrible!

Next year, I am planing at least twice as many tomatoes. This kind of drama is just ridiculous!

Regarding the storms – Jon, Jeremy, and I are all fine; we did rush to the basement a couple times when the tornado sirens went off, but nothing really happened, and Jon even spent most of the storm outside soaking up the rain and enjoying the excitement of the whole thing. Can’t say I necessarily condone that kind of activity, but I guess I’m glad a house didn’t fall on him!

Where are the other 2 tomato buckets?

All that’s left of them is some dirt on the deck…

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Testing WP app for iPhone. (Jon is driving, not me!)

I’m trying an experiment this year. I know you can grow determinate tomatoes like the BushSteak Hybrid pretty well in containers, and I know you can grow tomatoes upside-down, so I’m trying some upside-down BushSteak tomatoes on the deck this summer! You can’t see the plants very well in my picture due to all the background greenery, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point of this post is that Jon built me this beautiful cedar stand to hang my tomato buckets from, and I just love the heck out of it!

I’ll try to get some better pictures of the plants soon, maybe this evening. They’re nothing much to look at but I’m happy that they’re growing at all. Last year my grandma gave me a little tomato seedling which I put into a bucket, and it got kind of long and gangly and then died of neglect. This year I am actually trying to make an effort and I’m hoping it pays off at some point with at least a few tomatoes this summer. I just hope I didn’t plant them too late. I received the seedlings from Burpee a few weeks ago, but Jon didn’t get time to build the stand for about 2 weeks after that (it just took him 2 days), so they got a bit of a slow start. I guess that’s why I’m considering this whole project more of an experiment than anything… Wish me luck!

Our daycare just sent a bunch of pictures home with us yesterday, and most of them are pretty bad, as usual. (Deer-in-the-headlights, blank-faced gaping-mouthed baby, slightly out of focus). But this one, ohhhh this one! I just about died! The face he’s making! That shirt! His oh-so-casual position in the swing! Too perfect!

And for a little comparison, here’s Jeremy sitting in that same swing LAST summer – good grief, look how he has grown!

Oh, and here’s an unrelated picture of Jeremy eating sand at daycare. This is how we end up with gritty poops in the diaper. Lovely.

I guess I should probably post some of these pictures that my Dad took while Jeremy and I were visiting North Dakota during the Memorial Day weekend. This was during Jon’s business trip to Hawaii.

Before we left Fargo to go to the farm, Jeremy got to meet his second-cousin Molly for the 2nd time. When they last met, it was Thanksgiving; she was 7 days old and he was 7 months old. This time was much different. Jeremy was 13 months old, and Molly was 6 months old. Molly squeaked a lot and wanted to touch Jeremy’s face, but Jeremy was more interested in trying to get away from us to play with Molly’s toys!

I just liked this picture of Jeremy in the glass door at my aunt & uncle’s house.

Here we are at the farm. My aunt Connie and I are showing Jeremy the barnyard. (This was before we went inside the fence.)

Connie and Jeremy in the barnyard, inside the fence. We did not realize there was a bull in there yet! WHOOPS!

Jeremy really bonded with my uncle Eric

Aunt Lydia loved cuddling Jeremy! (This is my GRANDPA’S aunt, Jeremy’s great-great-great aunt. She looks great! I hope I age as well as her. I think a lot of it has to do with her wonderful attitude towards life.)

At one point I was lying on the floor and Jeremy decided to crawl on my back and start bouncing on me like I was a horse, and generally just hammed it up. I was laughing SO HARD, and so was everyone else in the room!

This was cute – Connie was giving a biscuit to her dog Tucker (the black and white one on the far left) and my mom’s poodle Belle and my mutt Bonzo came over to see what was being handed out. Then Jeremy followed suit! If there are treats being distributed, he doesn’t want to be left out! LMAO

(Belle pretty much spends about a third of her time on her hind legs like that. My mom calls her Circus Dog.)

My mom loves her grandbaby!

We showed Jeremy the cows out in the pastures

We were closer to some of them but there don’t seem to be any pictures of that.

He loved the tractor, especially honking the horn, and seeing the front-end loader go up!

My mom dug out an old farm toy-set that my brothers and I used to play with when we were little. It’s at our house now. His favorite part is the tractor, of course.

My mom and dad have this little old car that Jeremy loved driving and pushing around the yard when we got back to Fargo. He just had a little trouble figuring how to get out of it at first! LOL

He stayed in that position for several minutes, totally content. It was very funny.

“Bye Bye!”

(These were just a few of the pix from that weekend. All my dad’s posted Memorial Day pictures are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/philbonpete/sets/72157619383336439/ if you wanna see them all.)

Jeremy had tubes put in his ears this morning. We had to get up at 4:45 so that we could be on the other side of the Twin Cities by 6:00am for his surgery. The procedure went well, and the ENT surgeon told me that Jeremy’s middle ears had both been jam-packed full of thick mucous, which he suctioned out before putting the tubes in. He said that Jeremy will be feeling an immediate relief of pressure and pain, and his hearing is going to be much clearer now. He’s probably also going to be ear-infection free finally, which will be nice. He’s had chronic, almost constant ear infections for the last 9 months or so. He hasn’t been cranky or fussy about them, but I’m sure it’s not pleasant, and it does interrupt his sleep, which keeps us awake too.

After Jeremy woke up from the surgery, he fussed a little bit as the grogginess from the gas wore off, then he nursed for about two minutes and was then back to his normal bubbly self, charming all the nurses and other parents waiting for their kids! I was happy that he bounced back so easily. He’s such an easy-going guy!

By the time we had driven back home, the early morning hours had caught up with Jeremy and he had fallen fast asleep with his stuffed puppy in his lap.

He woke up when we went inside, but his mid-morning nap was a long one, so he must have still been exhausted! He was in great spirits all day though, and I was able to run a few errands with him and then we got to go to the park down by the lake! Jeremy enjoyed swinging on the swingset and calling out to all the other park-goers we saw.

Tomorrow morning, Jeremy and I hit the road to go to Fargo and see my parents. Then on Saturday, we are driving with them out to my grandparents’ ranch! It’s going to be a fun weekend, and I think Jeremy will have a great time. Jon is not going with us, because he’s on a business trip in HAWAII, that lucky dude! He’s doing some network setup or something for a company out there. I don’t know the details, but I’ll see if I can have him write something about it when he gets back, hopefully with pictures! He got a new underwater camera recently and is really excited to try it out on this trip.

Before the party started, he played with the Cookie Jar toy with Dad, and put some shapes through the holes. YAY!

Then he got to open the toy farm set we gave him – he was very interested in it!

A cool toy caterpillar from Grandma Huber:

He tore the paper off this present Very. Very. Slowly. In several small bits. It almost got boring, LOL

It was a ribbiting frog puppet from Grandma and Grandpa Peterson! (Trust me, even though he looks somber in that picture, he loves this thing – it really gets him laughing!)

I just like this picture. I think it looks like I’m gazing off to dream of the future, and meanwhile Jeremy is sneaking off to eat toilet paper or something mischievous like that, LOL

Here I am demonstrating the crown I made for Jeremy. He is amused.

CAVE BABY WANT MILK NOW. Nuff said.

After Jeremy took a nap, we had Sloppy Joes for lunch, but he was more excited about his Italian mixed vegetables (carrots, cauliflower, zucchini, beans) Yummy!

“Wut’s dat?”

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!

Grandma Huber gave Jeremy a tiny taste of chocolate cake. He didn’t like it.

“What the heck was that garbage? I wanted more cauliflower!”

Although he did decide to taste it a bit more, but not much. This is about as messy as he got. He’s much more into vegetables, thank goodness!

And the rest of the pictures are available here