Tree Peeler

Well, this is... not good.  One of the things we struggle with in parenting Joshua is that he has almost no impulse control.  When he has the sudden opportunity to do something, he will do it, even if he knows there will be consequences.  He also has a natural desire to damage/break/destroy things.  Combining those two, and, well, you have a bad combination.  He loves to play in the back yard, so we don't worry about him when he's back there, as there's not normally too much trouble he can get into.

But today he did.  He had taken a vegetable peeler out of one of the kitchen drawers, which I didn't know he had done, so I didn't think anything about the time he was spending in the back yard.  But when I happened to go out there, I was somewhat horrified to see that he had used the vegetable peeler to peel the bark off two of our trees!  Two of our midsize maples (I think they're maples; I'm terrible with trees) are now seriously damaged.  I'm worried the trees are going to die, which is going to be really sad, because it'll take many years for new trees to get as big as these are now.  Plus, one of them is his favorite climbing tree, and he would be disappointed to lose it.  Yet I don't know that he'll see that as a natural consequence of his actions.

I'm hoping they can be saved.  It's only the outer layer of the bark, but it's a LOT of it that's gone on each tree.  I'm going to have a tree guy (arborist?) come out and take a look to give me his thoughts.  Hopefully they'll survive, but I'm somewhat skeptical at this point.

As a side note, I shared this on Facebook earlier tonight, and while some people were similarly shocked, most of the reaction was interest in learning more about the awesome vegetable peeler we have that's so good it can peel a tree.  I obliged and provided them the information about it.  So my trees may die, but at least some people will have better experiences preparing carrots for dinner in the future.  I hope I don't have to rely on that as a silver lining.  Ugh.