Teaser Alert!

I know. I know! Y'all want to hear/see about our trip. We've been home a little over a week and I just now pulled all the pictures into Lightroom. I have 510 pictures to sort through and play with before I can give you the full update so you'll just have to be a little bit more patient. Sorry. Until then, here are two of my favorite pictures of our gorgeous (come on now, you know you agree with me!) kids from the trip. Kalyssa is as beautiful as ever with her hair braided by Aunt Shannon. (Thanks Shan! She loved it!) And Kaden is, of course, enjoying himself behind the wheel of a racecar. As far as he's concerned, there's no better place to be!

In other news ... my back surgery has been scheduled. I'll be getting a spacer fused in the L5-S1 disc space. The disc I was born with has degenerated to 1/3 the size it's supposed to be and it's starting to degenerate the bone in those two discs. I could expect as much as 70% improvement. I go in for surgery on June 4th so I'd appreciate it if you could keep us in your prayers.

Lots of Love!

The Payne's

I know ... I need to update. Not today though ...

I just HAD to blog what my son just said!

So, I'm watching an old episode of Dancing With The Stars that I missed while we were on vacation and Melissa Rycroft did her opening pose for a Cha Cha. My son, who was standing with me watching the TV, looked straight at her and said, "Wocka Wocka Wocka!" I just about fell over, it was so funny!!!

Easter Picture Parade!

Hello Friends and Family! The Payne Family hopes you all had a wonderful Easter! We sure did! Mostly. LOL! Yesterday afternoon I started coming down with a cold so I've felt pretty crummy. I just keep reminding myself that Mom always made sure we were well taken care of and were creating wonderful memories at times like these whether she felt crummy or not. I can't remember her ever complaining or even letting out a faint sigh (although I'm sure she did when we couldn't hear her) so I decided to just buck up and get on with it. I've always said that if I could be half as good of a mother as my mom then I'd be pretty darn good at it. So I'm hoping my children didn't hear me sigh at all today. :o)

I've got about 30 pictures to share with you so sit down, relax and enjoy the show. :o) I'm going to just give them all to you in the order in which I took them. The first ones are from coloring eggs at Oma's house yesterday morning. I wasn't sure how Kaden was going to do with this since he's not quite 2 yet. I had nothing to worry about! He LOVED every minute of it! And so did Kalyssa!

You'll have to forgive me for adding in some shots that don't have any kids in it. I'm learning how to use my camera and playing with Adobe Lightroom so you get to see all of my favorites. Even sans children. LOL!

This is Kalyssa's hand ...

And this one is Kaden's hand. There's no better way to get the egg out of the cup then to just reach in and grab it! LOL!

And then we got out some Crayola Paint Pens. We weren't sure how they were going to work with the eggs. They worked really well as long as the egg was dry. Kaden and Kalyssa both intently focused on "painting" their eggs!

And here they are! Ta Dah!

Oh yes ... we had to add some hats and sticker faces to some. I think the stickers would have stuck better if we had waited for them to dry longer. Still ... lots of fun!

And here we are on Easter morning. KC took Kalyssa to church. One of the churches we go to rented out the arena near our house and packed it FULL of 6000 people! I really wish I could have gone but I was feeling really sluggish and Kaden has had a runny/stuffy nose so he and I stayed home. The Easter bunny stopped by while KC and Kalyssa were gone though. After we had lunch we went out and gathered the eggs. Again, we weren't sure if Kaden was going to "get it" or not. He got the idea immediately! I had SO much fun watching them and capturing it all on "film."

Who needs and Easter Basket when you have these???

If my children grow up to be wacky individuals then you'll know where they got it from! LOL!

And the kids totally love their wacky daddy!

I'm reading into photography a little bit (only a little bit since I don't have much time) and one of the chapters I read recently was about photographing flowers. Here's my first try at it since reading that chapter.

I knew KC could juggle but I didn't know Kaden knew how too. LOL!

"Whoa!"

There's that silly Daddy again!

Okay ... this has got to be my favorite picture of the weekend! I'm going to use this someday to prove to my children that once upon a time they really did love each other! Aren't they sweet? They do this all the time!

See ... they really do love that wacky daddy of theirs. :o) I do too!

So there you have it! That's our weekend! I'll have a ton of pictures next weekend too. I don't know when I'll get them posted but keep an eye out for them! They're going to be awesome! :o)

Blessings to all!
KC, Shari, Kalyssa & Kaden

Holy Cow! I totally LOVE Adobe Lightroom!

Okay, this is going to be a quick post because it's late and I still need to do the dishes. But ... I just got Adobe Lightroom. For those of you who don't know, it's a program that lots of professional photographers use to make their photos look incredible. I've been playing with it only just this afternoon so I haven't even scratched the surface of what it can do. Already I am completely amazed! I just had to come in here and blog a couple of before and afters. The best ones I've done so far I can't post here because they are of other people's children and I just don't think that would be right. One of these isn't my kid but you can't see his face so that's okay, right?

Before ... Kalyssa and her friend playing in the sandbox ...

After! Way better! Right??!!!

Kaden playing in Mom's yard, before!
AFTER! Totally cool, right!

I am totally in love with this new program! My pictures will never look the same again!!!

Uh Oh!

My poor little baby! I guess it's a good thing that "chicks love scars" because this one just might stick around for awhile, although I'm sure it'll fade considerably over time. Before you say, "What in the world did you do to that precious little boy?" I will tell you that I had NOTHING to do with it! :o) I was standing about 2 feet away though. Okay, so here's what happened. My "desk" is actually my kitchen counter. I had an office/craft room a while back but it was closed and locked almost all the time. It has since become a playroom and it works wonderfully. Anyway, now I have a laptop on my kitchen counter and this is where I do all of my "scrapping." Digitally, of course. The cats like to sleep on my "office" chair when I'm not in it. On this day it was Symba's turn to catch a few "z's" in my chair. Kaden was being ever so sweet (as he always is with the cats - really, he is!) and petting Symba nicely. Symba decided that he had had enough and tried to step up onto the counter next to my laptop where I had some papers lying. He went slipping a sliding and fell, claws first, into my sweet, adorable child's face. Oh my, you should have seen the blood! This picture is after I stopped the bleeding and cleaned him up. Thankfully though, we've been pouring the Neosporin on him a couple of times a day and it's healing quickly. I still think there will be a mark there for quite awhile though. And we were getting ready to schedule the kids for a portrait session. I guess that'll have to wait a week or two.

I'm sure you all remember me mentioning that my children are quite silly and like me to take their pictures while they are being silly. Well here is the latest silliness. Kalyssa came out of her room with her dress on backwards and three, yes, THREE hats on her head! The way she was strutting around you'd think she was a diva! LOL! Of course, the camera came right out! What kind of scrapbooking mom would I be if it didn't? Huh?

Today is Wednesday, Kalyssa's favorite day. Every Wednesday morning she wakes up and says, "today is Wednesday! I get to go to gymnastics and Mema's coming!" (Mema is KC's mom, just in case you didn't already know that.) Today at gymnastics they did testing. She actually got to go to two classes in a row today because she missed last week (Kaden was sick.) She did really well in the first class and even better in the second, more advanced class! I was really proud of her today!

And then we picked up some chicken nuggets at Wendy's for the kids to share. Usually there isn't a very big mess at all. But today Kaden decided it would be loads of fun to rub his plate with the ranch dressing all over his face and head! Ugh!

And any scrapbooking mommy would be a proud scrapbooking mommy if their daughter felt the need to take pictures of bathtime! Especially if the child being photographed obliges so nicely!

And my sweet little boy said "bubble bath" in the sweetest little baby voice ever for the first time today! It was even completely understandable. At least I think so. But then again, I am the mommy who listens to him talk all day long so maybe I just understand his completely un-understandable gibberish too well. LOL! Here he is "blowing" bubbles. He's so cute I tell ya!

So how am I doing? Am I keeping you thoroughly up to date with this new blog? I'm trying!

Love,

KC, Shari, Kalyssa and Kaden

PS: I've been told that some people have been unable to post comments. I like comments (and haven't gotten any yet) so hopefully I was able to fix it. Please let me know if you have trouble leaving comments so I can keep trying to fix it. Thanks!

First Blogger Post

For the last few days I've been working on setting up this new blog the way I like it. So far it's pretty good but it still needs some tweeking. I've decided to start blogging at Blogger instead of Xanga because I like a lot of the features better and as far as I can tell there isn't any advertising on the sides unless I put it there myself. That's a bonus because I can't control what advertises over at Xanga. It chooses it's advertising based on words you use in your posts and if you happen to say anything even slightly off color then you might be seeing some off color advertising. That never really happened to me but I've seen it happen to friends of mine and I'd rather not take the chance. :o)

It hasn't been very long since I updated the Xanga blog (which will still have all my old posts if you feel the need to go back and see some of those photos) but there's been a few cute pictures taken since then so I'll go ahead and post them.
Lately the kids have been finding silly things to do and asking me to take their picture. Most of the time I have a hard time actually getting the picture taken because before I click the shutter Kaden is up and running towards me saying, "See? See?" That in itself is cute. I should try to take a video of it! :)

On this day (2/19/09) The kids climbed into the stuffed animal toybox in the playroom. They've done it a few times since and every time they want me to start taking pictures!

My Dad has been here quite a lot lately (he lives part time here and part time in my childhood home) helping to take care of Mom since her knee replacement. (She's healing really well!) While he was here he went to Dodge to replace Mom's lost car key and while he was waiting he decided to buy a new truck. He got a screamin' deal! He almost couldn't afford to not buy it. He puts tons of miles on his trucks so he was about due for a new one anyway.

On the same day Dad came home with his new truck I got my new telephoto lens. I'm not a very knowledgable photographer so I got a cheap lens for my first telephoto. I figure that when I get better I will hopefully be able to better afford a nicer lens. This one is really good though (for a cheap lens.) I took both of the photos of Dad's truck from my back porch. Even though I was shaking around like crazy when fully zoomed in my camera managed to focus pretty good. I'm going to have to find my tripod (it's been lost for about a year now, I might have to get a new one) and some time to play. One of these days I really want to take some photography classes at the local college. I can read up on photography until I'm blue in the face but I won't actually learn anything unless I have "homework assignments" to force me to do it.

Here's another picture of the kids being silly and wanting me to take their picture. This time they decided to climb into the cupboard in the TV entertainment center. We've had to clear out everything in it and screw the drawers shut because the littlest little stinker likes to pull everything out and make a big mess! Kalyssa decided on this day that we would have a "pajama day." She likes to do this on days when she knows we won't be going anywhere, including outside. She's had a cough for a little over a week now. It's never gotten very bad but this day was the worst for her. Kaden now has it and actually got bad enough that I took him to the doctor yesterday. His lungs are clear so we just need to wait it out. The poor little guy can cough for a full hour without stopping and he's so tender and clingy that I haven't been able to get anything done. He hasn't been sleeping well either. He seems to be a little better today (at least with the clingy-ness) so hopefully he's on the mend. KC's had it too but so far I've managed to stay clear of it, although I'm not sure how since I've had kids coughing in my face for over a week now!

Kalyssa has a couple of "favorite" night gowns (one is in the above photo) that have matching slippers. The nightgowns still fit just fine but the slippers have been a tad too small for awhile now. They are also very worn. On this day she finally stuck her toe through one of the slippers. All on her own she decided that the slippers, and thus the nightgown, needed to be thrown away. You just can't wear the nightgown without the matching slippers, ya know! We were very proud of her for making her little grown up decision but then the world ended when the other nightgown was dirty in the laundry! Now what do we do??? If she gets too out of control then we'll be dealing with a screaming child for an hour. So, my brilliant husband came up with the idea for her to pick some "jay jay's" and have a little fashion show photo shoot. Seriously, the man is brilliant! It totally worked and bedtime went fairly smoothly! Phew!

Oh ya, as an add-on to my last Xanga post when I explained my most recent MRI results ... I have an appointment with the surgeon on May 7th. I wish it were sooner but I expected it to be around 2 months so all is good. Now I just wait. In the meantime, I've been trying really hard to exercise consistently for the last couple of weeks. I've been doing really well. So far it hasn't really helped with my pain levels but I'm hoping that will change as my core strength improves.

Take care everyone!

Love,

KC, Shari, Kalyssa and Kaden