A Moment of Pure Joy, by Jacob Payne

Rus and I were cleaning out the garage this morning, irresponsibly leaving the kids inside to "watch a movie". We left the door open so we could hear them, and we assumed that the quiet was due to the zombie-like state that they usually find themselves in while watching a movie. To her credit, Bekah was actually watching it. But Jacob, who had been left on the counter to finish his popcorn (we didn't want him eating it in the living room...that would make a mess!), had instead discovered the open box of fruit loops and a baggie full of chips ahoy cookies. The picture tells the rest of the story (look closely, especially at the floor). I am sure that while we were busy in the garage, Jacob was dancing on the counter, spilling fruit loops in every direction possible, at which point his acute sense of smell directed his little hands to an oh-so available baggie of Chocolate Chunk and White Chocolate Chip Cookies, at which point he really had to sample each and every cookie before finally recognizing the wonderful and complete success of his adventure. He was so proud of those cookies when I walked in and found him with them! Ah the innocence of youth.

Christmas 2007

The most wonderful moments of this Christmas:

1. Waking up early and not being able to go back to sleep because I was so excited about my kids gifts.

2. Jacob seeing his rocking horse for the first time and saying "COW!" because that's what he calls horses. Now we have a horse named Cow. Somehow it eases and breeds confusion at the same time.

3. Seeing Bekah soooo excited to finally be able to open all of her presents..."It's Chrismas NOW! Yay!"

4. Seeing Rus open his stocking, where he found his awesome Sumo wrestler sqeeze horn for his bike. Talk about a cheeky gift. :)

5. Rus with his bug zapper. Okay, now this was the perfect gift for Rus (good job Amy!) It's a bug zapper shaped like a mini tennis racket. When you depress the switches on the handle, the wires in the racket are electrified...Rus, Amy, and her husband Mike all got a good shock out of it, and now Bugs Beware!!

6. Having almost all of my family in town. I wish I had taken a picture of the post-Christmas morning carnage at my mom's house. It was awesome.

7. Having all of Rus's family in town. Although I am glad we stayed Christmas eve night in our own home, and not there, because I heard that someone wrapped an alarm clock set for 3 a.m. under their tree...that's a little early for me.

8. Jacob and Bekah both got some new gloves and a hat for Christmas, mainly because I am always cold and I think they should be bundled up more. This picture is of Jacob with his tickle hands. I love it when he comes to tickle me, because his face gets all mischevious and then he puts his hands up and opens and closes them, and you can't help but laugh.

And of course, after all of the good moments, there were some things that I realized I should do differently or avoid all together for next year. So...

For next year I vow to:

1. Not be pregnant at Christmastime. Ugg. Ugg. No energy, finicky appetite, moody santa/grinch personality...

2. Look all year long for cool, inexpensive gifts for all my family so that I'm not stuck feeling guilty about leaving someone out on Christmas day.

3. Not try to make a huge homemade gift in the week before Christmas. The rocking horse was cool, but it would have still been cool three weeks earlier.

4. Not try to make gifts for everyone. I always want to, and I'm always discouraged when I can't find the time to do it all.

5. Did I mention not being pregnant?

6. Make treats for my neighbors way early in December, because I always put it off and then it doesn't get done and then they think we're grinches.

7. Ignore the grinch that I live with (hmm..Rus!) and still put up Christmas lights because I've always wanted a house with lights and the large blue mismatched bulbs of my childhood just didn't cut it.

8. Only spend $20.00 on each child. Honestly, I make a rocking horse and it gets 15 seconds of attention...I buy matchbox cars and they are the toy of choice for two days. Hmmm...lets compare...

9. Make Rus go shopping earlier. He always waits until the week (or weekend) before Christmas to do his shopping, and then he has a horrible experience, and then I feel guilty that he had to run around to three different stores to find something for me.

I guess that's about everything...I hope your Christmas was wonderful and that your New Year will be full of happiness, adventure, and blessings.

Happy 2nd Birthday, Jacob!

So my little boy is TWO! He woke up a pretty cranky tw0-year-old, but his day improved dramatically when grandma and grandpa brought over a big yellow tonka truck for him to play with. As solid as he may be, getting him to eat is like pulling teeth, so we were very happy that the tonka truck provided a new, exciting place for him to ignore his breakfast. (Just kidding...he ate every bite...Go Truck!) I have tried uploading this picture three times and I cannot get it to go the right way, so you're outta luck...just rotate your head. Jacob's other present was this awesome wood train, hand-crafted by the wonderful Amish people of Pennsylvannia. Jacob has the funniest word for "train", it's more like the sound of the whistle. If you say "gunnn" from the back of your throat, it almost sounds like that. I don't know where he got that from, or why, but I guess it works. So when he pulled out each piece of his train from the gift bag, he was overwhelmed with excitement and just kept yelling "train! train!" in his own special way. I think he also enjoyed the fact that he could get away with not sharing it. If Bekah looked at his train or his tonka truck cross-eyed, Jacob would wail "MINE!" and then Rus and I would repeat the lecture to her that sorry, but it's Jacob's special day, and he doesn't have to share right now. All in all I think he had a good birthday...although I truly realized this year how horrible it is to have a birthday around Christmas (his is December 20th). It is just way too busy a time to even try to get friends together for a birthday party, what with all the other stuff going on. I think we'll just start now and tell him his birthday is really in June. Just a small fib...

Post Holiday Daze

So I've been sitting here, looking at my blog, checking out comments, looking at other blogs, thinking that people haven't posted since the 22nd or 23rd and it's been a busy couple days...and then I looked back at my own blog and realized I hadn't written anything since the 7th! Slacker! Actually I've just been so, so busy getting ready for Christmas! I can't believe all the stuff I wanted to do and tried to do, and what didn't get done, and what did get done, and all the things that I am swearing I will never try to do again. Like make a rocking horse for Jacob in the week before Christmas. Or try to hand-stitch my car mat for the kids. Or make a picture frame for my brother. The list is much longer for the things that I wanted to do, but couldn't and didn't. So, now in my post-holiday daze, I do realize that I have a couple of really good pictures of fun events from the past couple of weeks that I really want to post, like from Jacob's birthday, and of course from Christmas. But I also realize, in my daze, that it won't get done tonight, and I won't feel the really pressing need to do it for at least a few more days...so I guess this note is to say that I know I've been out of touch, but I'll make up for it soon. :) I hope your holidays were wonderful and that you all can breathe easier and relax now!
love, keri

A Small Growing Payne

We love to laugh!

Laughter is the most wonderful thing! It can erase pain or sadness or bad feelings faster than anything. Bekah is a good example...the other day she was jumping on a friends couch (their jump-jump couch) and flipped right over the arm and onto the floor and started crying. Rus went over and said, "Wow Bekah, you sure jumped far", with a big smile on his face, and she instantly perked up and said "Yeah!" Then she jumped up and started jumping all over again, bad memory forgotten.
I took these pictures today of them being silly. The love to pretend that I'm a monster, and then they try to run and get me, but I tickle them and make them run away again. I love this picture of Bekah laughing and running. That is HER. Completely defined in one picture...the big smile, my little girl in constant motion. Jacob was doing the same thing, running, trying to attack the mommy-monster, but he had to do it as a little bear instead of a boy. Let me tell you, costumes are great! I don't care if Bekah is Tigger for the entire day, even if we wind up at Walmart fully decked out in apparent post-Halloween dress. It keeps them both happy and silly and I love it. Jacob was really enjoying getting me and then running away with Bekah, but he got really mad when she closed her bedroom door without letting him in first. So that's the picture of the poor little bear cub, curled up on the floor. So dejected. He loves to do what she does and must find it incredibly unfair that she has power over the doors while he does not.


So this last picture is of me and my prized Bekah-eating-snakes. Bekah appreciates it when I take a little extra effort when putting her down for a nap, so this is how she got to bed today. She got attacked by the snakes and carried off, with only a brief pause for a good photo op. Sweet dreams!

Reminiscing

Okay, so I hope you don't think this is ridiculous, but for those of you who don't know, I send out an email pretty regularly, about every month. I'm copying one of those emails to here for those of you who haven't read it. It's from March of 2007. I think it's funny, and whenever I start catching up with someone who has gotten my emails, they always bring up this one. I'm happy that such a bad experience could now bring some much needed laughter. :) So I hope you enjoy.


So, the realization has been sneaking up on me that not only do I have kids to test my patience, I also have them to help me fine-tune my sense of humor. I think a sense of humor is like rose-colored glasses that you have to wear upside-down...Take for instance the spectacle of Jacob with a really bad, bad case of diarreah in the Wal-Mart check out lane. If you throw in the fact that I was completely out of wipees, my face was beet red as a result of a pounding heart and a mild (yeah right!) case of embarrassment, and Jacob was screaming on the top of his lungs (I guess he was embarrassed, too..), you might feel a sympathetic chuckle rising in your chest. Now, just contemplate the ramifications of a bad case of diarreah in the Wal-Mart check out lane. Poop-covered food is not fun to clean up, but you absolutely have to before you can buy it. I'm sure any employee of Wal-Mart would call it a day on that one..."POOP on the FOOD??! I'M OUTTA HERE!" And it's not like you canjust leave the cart, grab the kids, and bolt. Then you and the kid's carseat would be covered in poop. AND you'd have to repeat the painful hour that it took you to acquire all the food you needed. I'll just say that I'm glad that it took me at least 15 minutes in the Wal-Mart bathroom to clean up Jacob and all the food, because by then all the people that had been witnesses to "My Most Embarrassing Moment" were already gone. And, can I also say that I disagree with all of the save-the-tree advocates who think that everything has too much packaging. Packaging can save your food from poop. That's all I have to say about that.

And some pictures...

So, this is my Bekah girl having a fit tonight downstairs. She was so, so sad, but she stopped wiggling at least when I asked her to. :)
This is Bekah and her giraffe (Jacob). They love to dress up in their Halloween costumes. Usually Bekah is a horse or a tiger, but this time she was happy just hugging a giraffe.

Bekah sitting in her bucket. When not holding her doll clothes, this bucket is either holding her bum or on her head. Ahh the joys of made-up toys.

I won't be distracted by the screaming...

So, this is my first blog...a momentous experience, and one which my 3 1/2 year old daughter Bekah apparently doesn't appreciate. She's downstairs crying "Don't leave me alone! Come sit with me!" I never realized until we moved into this house that our stairs are like Mt. Everest to our children. Insurmountable. Unless you're holding their hand, in which case the stairs are just a little unbearable. But if you carry them, like the taxi-cab parent that you are, all is well...heck go up and down them a couple extra times just for fun!
And then there's Jacob. He's 2, and he has just learned how and when to say "poop". It's one of the few words that he can say very, very clearly. He points to his bum every time he says it, too, so that really helps him communicate his point. Unfortunately he likes to say it more than he likes to do it, so unlike before when he'd be screaming and everybody else thought he was just grumpy, now he screams and says "POOP!" and lets everyone know why he's crying. Oh well. If I want him to learn how to talk, I guess he has to learn all the words and not just the ones I want him to, like "I love you" and "You're the greatest mom ever".
Well, now I'm wondering what else to say...It's like when you've ran into an old high school friend that you haven't seen in forever, and there's just so much space to fill that you don't know quite where to start. If I just dive in and say I'm excited tomorrow is the last day of my machining class, you'll be really confused. I could sum up my five year marriage in a few words "happy, comfortable, wonder what the next five and ten and twenty will bring", but that might be sappy. I could say that I have a degree in interior design, but then you might think that my house is an awesome showpiece and my dream should be to work on trading spaces or something, but it's not...But I do have what I consider an awesome playroom for my kids (cool paint and adequate shelves), and that works for me. Sooo with that vague introduction I think I'll call it good for a night... :)