Tuesday, I took the oldest to get a cone scan done on her jaw. The radiologist that she went to is supposed to be one of the best! So we are hopeful that he is able to really discern the concerns that the doctors will be dealing with. Secondly, her specialist thinks she has found an orthodontist closer to home. She was looking for someone that worked with the same healing philosophy as she has.
The two April children headed off for a conference three hours away late in the week. Mid-Kid and I stayed home to prepare for and work the farmers markets. The Friday market was shut down early due to serious impending weather. The Saturday market was HOT and slow. There was a tractor show in town and any time anything else is going on it usually slows down our business. But even with the weather and lack of people we felt blessed by the profits we made.
We have had a lot of rain. My ground looks weedy but there is stuff growing out in the middle of it. I am seeing the benefits of the ground cover keeping the dirt from flooding. I am also beginning to see what I think is the benefit of the mychorrizae feeding the roots…because in this type of wet and heat the plants usually would look stressed but they don’t seem to be. I still feel a lot like I am making this up as I go along and I still am struggling to get the rest of my stuff planted. (The ground is too wet) It is not too late yet so I am not stressing….we are calling this a year to learn and improve…and I am learning. It is not my goal this year to supply lots of veggies at the Farmer’s Markets so I have reduced my stress on that issue.
We have been picking strawberries,-- way too many. They are starting to slow down; we only got 13 lbs yesterday. I did not realize how much Mid-kid has put in the freezer until a couple of days ago! So we are now canning them for more long term storage. I am thinking about cooking some down and making strawberry butter….ya know, like apple and pear butter? Fruit butters with no added sugar are fabulous in our homemade yogurt. I make mine in crockpots, but beware, I once had a handle break on my crockpot and 15lbs of cooked down apples landed on the floor!!!
It looks kind of like it is going to be fruit butter year…both the apples and the pears are loaded. It is rare when both produce heavily. I am already not looking forward to the labor of cleaning that much fruit.
I did take my dad for a follow up with the cardiologist. He put him back on Lasik and now we are dealing with the reintroduction to medicine confusion and sleepiness. When he gets like this he can’t get out of his wheelchair without help. And this morning he really needed the help. He was so confused he couldn’t even remember how he normally gets in the bed. (He does have a set pattern of transfer steps that he/we follow.) I had to stand on the bed and lift him up. I told my Mom, from here on out, if a doctor introduces something like this, we need to cut the pill into quarters and then halves to gradually introduce it into his system. (And yes, I do know that some pills are not supposed to be cut in half…. So no, I wouldn’t do that…)
He is so very sensitive to medicines and any fluctuation with them almost always causes problems. Every time the VA is late getting his Gleevic to him, he goes through a reaction. He was off of it 2 or 3 days this time. A day later, after reintroducing it his back side broke out in a skin rash, a common side effect but one he has not had before. Mom called me up and said, “Dad has shingles…” I went out there and he said he didn’t have any pain, and no it didn’t itch…he didn’t even know it was there. We determined this was not shingles. At first, I thought it was a MRSA rash (I became very familiar with those last year) so I started to treat it with an oregano salve which was effective on my father-in-law. But I went back and reviewed MRSA rashes and decided, no it wasn’t that either…so then I turned to the Gleevic list of side effects and quickly fond what I suspect is the culprit. Several days later, it has blistered and has turned that shade of red that means he is probably on the down side of the outbreak.
Now it is a matter of getting him through the Lasik fog. My worry is about this is his fluid intake. If he isn’t drinking enough because he is so sleepy then we have the dehydration concern, which was why the doctor took him off of it in the first place…
So as you can see, not much to write about, just normal days of doing normal stuff.