I taught my kids to swim when they were a babies since we had a pond right beside the house that was just a deep hole in the ground and would be hard to get out of since it was very deep. My daughter disappeared on day when she was about a year old when I put her down for a nap and one of the older kids had left the door open so I thought she had gotten outside. I looked all over the entire house and couldn't find her anywhere and yelled and yelled. I was so scared to go look in the pond and find her floating since she loved to collect frogs near the pond and stuff them in her pullups. A whole nother story. I called my husband after I looked in there and he came home with the police since we lived on 450 acres in the middle of nowhere to help search and she had been missing for 2 hours. Guess where she was. She had pushed the mattress over a little and was wedged between the wall and matress covered all the way up snoozing away. I thought I was going to pass out when we found her I was so relieved. Kids are never too young to learn to be careful around the pond and not go near it without an adult and to swim so if they do fall in they won't panick and have a chance of getting out.

I built 2 raised beds and filled them up with dirt this spring. One was for veggies, and the other was an extension of my partly shaded flower bed. I was late starting my tomato seeds and then the near triple digit heat in May hit. I've picked one grape tomato so far this year. The rest were split or stolen. I had 2 large green tomatoes, and yesterday I noticed that the squirrels must have twisted them off the vine and carried them away. My squash produced a few blooms and then got scorched to death. I planted potatoes for the first time, and I did have a pretty good harvest. I also picked a few cucumbers. My cannas and elephant ears never did come up this year. I usually cut them off after the first freeze, but I didn't last year. My guess is water/snow/ice collected in the stalks and turned the roots into mush. It seems I remember it got colder last winter than it has in many years as well. I planted a bunch of lily, iris, and canna bulbs in the new raised bed. Maybe 4 lilies came up. I think the squirrels dug up the cannas. I'm too depressed to even try to see what happened to the irises. After languishing for a few years, it looks like the gophers finally killed off my rose bush. It has been a great year for them. They've been in my flower beds and another hosta literally disappears each night. They've been celebrating in my fescue lawn as well. I've been on vacation this week, cleaning up and assessing the damage in the early morning hours. By 8 a.m., my shirt is already sticking to me. I planted a couple of knock-out roses I got a good deal on. I wrapped poultry netting around the roots and flooded all the gopher tunnels I could find. I purchased about $35 of starter plants and seeds on eBay just now trying to replace some of what I lost. They'll have to be babied the rest of the year and maybe grown in containers and overwintered inside. It can't stay this hot forever, can it?

My 13 year old granddaughter will be wearing one of these Herbst appliances very soon, but it's not intended to correct an overbite or underbite. She had been experiencing headaches for about the past two years, and for over a year her jaw has been making a loud clicking sound as she opens and closes her mouth causing her pain each time. She was finally taken to a dentist who then referred her to an orthodontist. They thought it may be TMJ, so the doctor ordered an MRI of her jaw area. It was not TMJ. The right side of her jaw isn't even connected, and the clicking noises are coming from left side of her jaw . The orthodontist said he has never seen a case so sever as this in a child before...only saw cases like this with adults who have been in a traumatic auto accident, or who have had a forceful blow to their face. Her mom doesn't recall any such things ever happening as she was growing up. But I do remember when she had a root canal and cap done at the age of 3 or 4 years old. I distinctly recall how she cried in pain for hours afterwards and I couldn't find a way to comfort her. I even drove her back to the dental office where it was performed that same day and they insisted nothing was wrong with her. The orthodontist who just recently requested the MRI be done, said she has a smaller mouth than most others. I have a gut feeling, and from after talking with others about this, that there's a possibility that when they did the root canal procedure it may have partially dislocated her jaw and that her jaw never went back into the normal position as she was growing all these years. The Orthodontist does not guarantee that wearing the Herbst will even solve her problems in the end, which is heart wrenching to even think of. It's even more heartbreaking to know the pain she is going to have to endure wearing this appliance. But worse, if it doesn't work, they said surgery is the next option. I've heard that with surgery nerves will be cut and loss of feeling in the chin area occurs causing the person to always drool. That would be so traumatic for any teenager to have to deal with. This is so difficult to even imagine what might happen in the long run. I just pray that wearing the Herbst will completely correct her condition. Please, if there is anyone else who has had this similar condition, please let me know how your results were with wearing this appliance.

All I can contribute is that Blessed Child is not one of the HTs that is tolerant of cold zones. She repeatedly didn't survive even my virtual zone 6, so she's probably only zone 7 and warmer. That's not an issue for you in the South of course, so I'm no help with your OP questions. Cynthia