A Baptism and a Blessing

In Search Of

We need a new name for this blog. Main House of Payne was a good stopgap, but Sam and I both have blogs with House of Payne in the title, and two is the limit. (Unless we want to do House of Payne World Tour, in honor of that t-shirt Sara made like ten years ago, which I still wear.)

How about one of these? They're all terrible, but . . .

* Grandchild Photo Exchange
* Life is Payne
* Dad Doesn't Read This
* Payndersons
* Fatti and Mutti
* Former Umbarts Association (Umbarts Anonymous?)
* Oh Du Froehliche
* The Payne Plantation
* Moving Day Soup

Anyone else have ideas?

--JOHN

I can't stop!!

Clearly I am the only one who posts here, but hopefully someone is seeing these pictures. Here is Jack as Clifford, the big red dog.



Adam, just with a great smile; I couldn't pass this one up.


Don't have too many full face pictures of me, but here are a couple of me and Rab.




A rite of passage at the Anderson house -- holding on to Dad's thumbs.



All the junk Jack had in his bed. He likes his stuff. He gathers it at night when the other kids are asleep and puts it in his bed to sleep with. Also he is not doing PJs these days. Just clothes.




Abby lost her two front teeth. Wants them back before Christmas.



Mark started to scale a dead palm leaf (frond?) and made it about half way up the tree. He is also good at climbing stop sign poles and street sign poles. He has some real physical talent.

Camping August 08

We decided to take everyone camping for Labor Day weekend. We went up to "the rim," which is not the Grand Canyon rim, but another geological rim-like feature about 2 hours north of us. We had a great time and will try to go again soon. Here is Adam setting up the kids' tent. We slept with Rab in another tent. They did pretty well, waking up and getting rowdy (I think they were cold) around 2:30, and then not again until 6. Of course, I call that "pretty well" because I was not the one getting up at 2:30 to get their blankets straightened up and tell them to go back to sleep.



Here are the Big 4 enjoying the campfire.



Rab is congested (again!) and sick, so he mostly slept.



Preparing our smoked milk for breakfast . . . (actually we had to thaw it; I had frozen it).




Chopping wood with axe-shaped sticks they found.






The kids were shocked to discover that Dad can cook!