My tomato buckets got through the thunderstorms of Saturday night just fine. Even the one with the goofy duct-tape band-aid looked pretty good on Sunday morning, so I was feeling pretty good about my fix, but by Sunday afternoon and evening it was starting to look wilted again. I decided to just leave it there until it either recovered or else completely withered away and was 100% dead. I didn’t feel optimistic, but I wasn’t going to give up!

Much to my surprise, it survived the night and actually looked a little more perky this morning than it did at the end of yesterday! It’s not nearly as droopy and wilted, and the leaves have some more vigor to them again. I have mixed feelings about this, because now I realize (or at least strongly believe) that I could have patched the other plant that I thought was “dead” after the initial fall. And I’ve also learned that even if I couldn’t have patched the injury, I could have cut it off completely and put it in a jar of water until it had re-grown a healthy enough root system to be planted again. Oh well… I guess these are all lessons learned, to be used in future summers.

Also, and most importantly, next summer I will NOT wait until so late into the month of June to order tomato seedlings! Next year, I will start some seeds indoors when it is still cooler outside in the spring, so I can get some actual tomatoes much earlier in the summer.

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!

Here they are…

Their weak plastic handles split, and they had both fallen and crushed the plants…

A survivor?

This one may pull through.

Crushed to death.

This one looks like a goner.

So sad…

The dead one had been starting to blossom

Blossom of hope?

The possible survivor is also showing a little bloom!

The lone hanging plant…

Looks like this one may bloom soon, too…

UPDATE! The “dead” plant looks like it still has one living branch, and the main stem seems to still be alive, although a bit scraped up. I gave it a dose of fertilizer and have my fingers crossed – maybe with luck it will make a recovery!

We went in on Monday for the exam and even more red flags popped up immediately. There were posters all over the office talking about “subluxation” which, in case you didn’t know, was invented in 1895 by a guy who did not believe in the roles of things like germs and hormones in disease, and thought EVERY sickness was caused by – and could be treated via – nerves in the spine. The good (and sadly, rare) chiropractors, like the one I used to see, know that this concept is medical and scientific bunk (those are the chiros who only treat actual physical back issues, and will refer you to a “real” doctor if you need other kinds of medical treatment), but the people I spoke to at this office were ALLLLLL about the subluxation. (I got so sick of that term by the time we left there.)

They had framed testimonials all over the waiting room from clients who talked about how they didn’t need to take medicine for any of their previous chronic conditions anymore since they started seeing these chiros (as far as I can remember, the exact conditions were never specified except for back pain). Incidentally, a lot of the testimonials were really poorly written, like the people who gave them were slightly uneducated or illiterate – the thoughts expressed in them just seemed like they weren’t very cohesive. It was odd.

The first chiropractor I spoke to (we saw two that day) kind of annoyed me. He struck me as a super sporty athletic jock type of guy. He told me that he didn’t believe in chiropractics until a chiropractor cured his asthma, so then he decided to become one. (He never explicitly claimed that he could cure anything – and I know that’s because it is not legal for them to make such claims!) I didn’t pay super close attention at the time, but now that I think about it, I am pretty sure they used a lot of really vague language about seeing subluxation in such-and-such vertebrae, and how the nerves to such-and-such organs in the body branch off from those vertebrae, so they were inferring/implying a lot of things, but never claiming they could cure anything. They did heavily imply that Jeremy’s ears could be treated with chiropractic adjustments. Oh, the other thing that bugged me about this guy is that he said, “I’ll be the one seeing you next time, I’ll do the adjustments on Jeremy when you come back tomorrow,” which REALLY irritated me because Jeremy had not even been examined yet!! It came across as a) extremely presumptuous and b) kind of scammy?quacky? something like that… At first I figured, “Well, heck, it can’t hurt anything to try it out, just in case it might make a difference in the ears,” but I have since changed my mind – I’ll explain later.

The 2nd chiropractor who saw us was the one who did the exam on Jeremy. She was nice, but seemed a little too tied up in the whole concept of subluxation affecting everything in the whole world. I also felt like she kind of over-simplified things and glazed over a lot, and nothing was ever really explained to me sufficiently. She ran a little reader up Jeremy’s back which gave an image on a computer screen and showed a bit of compression or “subluxation” in 3 vertebrae in his neck, and 3 more in his upper back. She told me which organs a couple of those vertebrae are normally associated with, but not all of them (the ones she zeroed in on linked up with the sinuses, nose, tear ducts, esophagus – things that we have trouble with whenever Jeremy’s ears are infected. She told me we’d have to make an appointment to have Jeremy’s first adjustment right away for the very next day, and then we’d also have to come to some kind of session on Saturday morning for – well, I’m not even sure what!! She said there would be other clients/parents there, and that Jeremy could play with the toys in the waiting room while they talked to all of us? I think it was some kind of “educational” session all about the concept of subluxation or something. Ugh.

She told me that little kids usually respond very quickly to chiropractic adjustments, but I asked her, “What about follow up and maintenance? When he’s sufficiently adjusted, is he done?” and she told me that he’d need to keep coming back for constant maintenance to keep his spine in shape. Uh-huh, sure.

So then I kind of got pulled into making an appointment for the next day before I even had time to think, and the rest of the evening I was feeling kind of uneasy about it. I told Jon, and also my mom, that I was willing to try anything to see if it would help Jeremy’s ears so he wouldn’t get any more infections, that it certainly couldn’t hurt anything, but I was actually having trouble convincing myself. Ultimately, I called the next morning to cancel the appointment. It’s not that I think it would hurt to get an adjustment done on Jeremy, but I just don’t have fantastic feelings about the pseudo-science that was being pushed by these people, and I didn’t want to get sucked into any kind of cycle of “recommended treatments” that would be harder to get out of. In addition to that, I just don’t feel like it’s fair to let these people charge my insurance company over and over and ultimately just bring costs up for everyone. There just isn’t enough hard evidence that this kind of stuff can help ear infections, and all I really wanted was to see if Jeremy might be at risk for scoliosis like Jon had! I never wanted to go down the road of ear infections, but somehow they used that to try to suck me in. I just didn’t like it. I was frustrated enough that I had trouble getting to sleep that night, and even then I tried to keep my mind open, but by Tuesday morning I knew I had to cancel and not go back.

I should mention that I do not think all forms of alternative and complementary medicine are bunk, but I have to draw the line somewhere, and for some reason this particular thing just doesn’t sit right with me. I know there are plenty of legitimate uses for chiropractics, and my own chiropractor (who never once pressured me to schedule any return visits unless I really wanted them) helped me with a lot of pain, but almost everything about this experience yesterday was just wrong.

He also got to play a fishing game with a little magnetic fishing rod, and he caught 3 magnetic fish from the little pond, and got to pick out a prize (he picked a green stuffed fish). I think he would have rather stayed there “fishing” all evening though.

On Saturday morning, we all went downtown again for the annual 4th of July parade, held on the 3rd so it didn’t interfere with church services on the 4th. Forest Lake has the biggest Independence Day Parade in the county, and it was scheduled to be about 2 hours long! We got there about 20 minutes before it started at 10am, and decided to leave about halfway through since the temperature was creeping into the 90s. Jeremy loved seeing and hearing all the horses, fire engines, tractors, and MUSIC! He danced to the bagpipes and marched in place when the marching bands came through. He didn’t pick up any candy that was being thrown, but he did get a police-badge sticker and TWO freeze-pops in that one hour. Not too shabby!

We got home a bit before noon, had a light lunch, and then all 3 of us took a big long nap. On hot days like that, it’s very nice to have air-conditioning in the house! After our naps, one of my friends from Fargo called to say that she and her boyfriend were in the cities, and we decided to meet up with them down at the Como Zoo, which is a very nice little zoo, especially for being free! We saw giraffes, lions, tigers, and polar bears (oh my!) and had a nice time. To leave the zoo, you have to walk through Como Town, a little child-sized amusement park, and of course Jeremy made a bee-line for the little car ride that he had seen on the way in – the one we told him we could see when we left the zoo. He remembered exactly where he had seen it and ran as fast as he could to get there, and then proceeded to pitch a big crying fit while waiting for Jon to go purchase some tickets for him to take a ride. He cheered up as soon as they let him through the gate, and rode the cars twice before we had to go. Another crying fit ensued, but he cheered up pretty quickly as we left.

We went out for dinner at TGI Friday’s and had a nice time, and then Simone and Dan went on to do some more touristy things in Minneapolis while we went home to put Jeremy to bed. He’d had a big exhausting fun day and fell asleep really fast! Simone and Dan came back to our house later, since I’d offered to let them stay in our guest room, and we had fun chatting, watching movies, and just doing some nice catching up.

On Sunday afternoon, Jon, Jeremy and I went to Jon’s parents’ house for a nice BBQ with their family, Jon’s grandma, and his uncle, aunt, and 2 cousins. After dinner we did a few small fireworks in the backyard. They were nothing huge, just a few pretty little fountains and such, but the first one had some pretty loud BANGs that startled Jeremy a little bit. After that, we did quieter ones and he ended up being pretty interested in watching them. He even had his own ideas about what kind of show we should put on for him – he kept saying, “Ahhhh….. a GREEN one next!” He was also impressed watching Jon’s younger cousins dancing in the yard with sparklers. They created a lot of smoke which kind of obscured everything, and Jeremy exclaimed, “Whoa, lady hiding in the smoke!” Too cute! (The cousins are pre-teens, but to Jeremy they are “ladies” – I guess they are the Big Kids in the family now!)

Sorry for the lack of pictures, we were just too busy enjoying ourselves and having fun to remember to take any last weekend! I hope everyone reading this had a safe, happy, and FUN 4th of July too!

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!

Jeremy is pretty enthusiastic about wanting to be a KITE when he grows up. Here is a video from supper last night where he says it at least twice:

Here is Jeremy helping me bake last week on Monday (ie, eating cake batter with a spatula) and talking about his favorite aunt, Jeanette

We haven’t done a lot of work on potty learning with Jeremy, because it didn’t seem like he was totally ready yet, but we do have a potty chair that he likes to open, close, sit on and cheer. We’ve tried sitting him on it a few times, just for fun, no pressure, but he has never really understood what it’s for. Lately though, he’s started showing a little more awareness of bodily functions – I’ve noticed him tugging at his diaper and saying “toot” when he is going to pee or poop, and he has come to me with a poopy diaper and said, “toot” – so these are good signs. He’s also said, “Potty!” when he sees either of us using the toilet, so there’s some recognition starting to show there, too.

(“Toot” is Jeremy’s word for all bodily functions that happen in the diaper area, so he says it for pee, poop, tooting, and diarrhea like he had when he was sick a couple weeks ago. It was so sad, he was whimpering, “Toot? Toot?” and I’m sure he felt just awful, the poor little guy.)

Yesterday morning, when I was getting Jeremy’s diaper changed, he said “toot” and then peed right away, so I figured we might as well start trying the potty chair a little more in earnest. I know they say that the first pee of the morning is the easiest one to get in the potty, so I figured we’d give it a try today.

After we got up, I showed Jeremy the potty in the bathroom again, and we practiced getting on and off of it with the little-boy-shield in place (it’s a high one!) He didn’t seem interested in sitting for very long, but he was having a lot of fun sitting and standing, so I just figured he didn’t have to pee at that time. He didn’t want to come to the bedroom to get dressed, so I left him naked in the bathroom to keep playing sit-stand with the potty chair, while I went to get his diaper and clothes. When I came back, he was sitting on the potty, said “toot,” and then immediately stood up, and I could see that he had gone pee all by himself! We cheered long and loud for his big accomplishment, and then I let him dump the potty in the big toilet and flush it all by himself.

I couldn’t quite tell if he got exactly what was going on (it could have just been a lucky coincidence, and he seemed a little bewildered by the pee in the potty), but it’s a positive start so far! I know most boys don’t use the potty consistently until they’re closer to about 3 years old, so I figure anything before then is going to be cause for celebration