The Past Few Weeks...

Derek had gum grafting surgery a week ago and he is starting to be able to eat food a bit easier now. He did really well with the surgery. There was some pain and kind of was an annoyance to have with eating food and such but overall he did well. I had the same surgery done a few years ago and he did better recovering than I did. Basically what they do is cut some skin from the roof of your mouth and graft it in where it is needed. Derek's was his bottom lower gums. He had to get it done because his teeth were getting sensitive because the gums were wearing away in that one spot. He still has his stitches in but doing really well. Here is a picture right after his surgery. We didn't get one of the inside of his mouth because he wasn't allowed to show that in case it ripped or did anything while it was still very sensitive.

This week was my last week at the preschool. It is so crazy to me and I'm not sure that it has fully hit me yet that I am done. My classroom is totally cleaned out and I handed in my iPad and keys. It is weird to see that chapter of my life come to a close and its really hard to come to grips with because I love that job so much as well as the people and the kids that I work with. It is so rewarding to work with some of these kids. They are so special and to be able to see them progress and grow is so fun. The ladies that I work with are the most wonderful women in the world and I will be sad to not be able to work with them so closely anymore. But I will still keep in contact with them all and always be their close friend. Here are a few pictures of my last day.

This is the first summer honestly since graduating high school that I have not been taking some kind of summer class or getting ready for the next school year and it is very weird. I am so excited to get things ready in the next three months though to welcome our little guy into our family. Its coming faster than we thought, but we are so excited.

Derek is working full time at the college now and taking advantage of the free hours he has to work on projects and do things that he has wanted to do for awhile. Now we can have our summer adventures begin...

Birthday, Mothers Day, and More

Hey everyone! I have been meaning to post for a couple weeks now to update you on a few things but its just been a bit crazy. I am finally getting around to it though. So here we go. We celebrated my birthday on May 2nd. It was a great birthday. I went to work and when work was over we had a big family dinner and opened presents and just spent the rest of the evening relaxing and visiting with family. Thank you to everyone who made it a great birthday. Here are a few pictures from the party.

For my birthday Derek got me a new laptop since mine was dying (its a chromebook and i love it), and he also got me a big body pillow (because sleeping is starting to get a little more uncomfortable with my growing tummy). My parents gave me money to put towards a new rocking glider chair for my nursery and Derek's parents gave me some money as well. I also got some candy and some of the most comfy pajamas I've ever owned. It was a fun day. 

On mothers day we went to my moms ward to be with her and my dad. It was fun to visit their ward. After that we spent some time with her and then headed to the Paynes. We all took a trip to Hurricane for a family get together and then headed back just in time to skype with Elder Alan. :) It was fun talking to him and hearing some of his fun stories. He is doing great. Here are a few pictures from our skype with him. 

Mothers day was a great day and Derek and I are both so blessed to have such wonderful moms in our lives. They are both great examples and we love them and appreciate all they do for us. 

Derek is done with school!! ... well for this semester and then only one more to go! He passed all his classes with great grades and is now working full time in the summer. He is mowing a few lawns again this summer and keeping busy. I only have 2 short weeks left of my school year and then I am done... a little bit sad but exciting at the same time. I have slowly been cleaning out my classroom and trying to get things done there so it doesn't hit me all at once. We are doing a lot of cleaning and going through a bunch of our stuff to sell in order to make room for this baby and get things prepared. I'm almost 6 months along and its coming faster than we both thought it would. Life is wonderful and we are so blessed. Thats all the updates for now. See you next time. :)

Relay for Life

We spent part of Friday night at the Relay for Life event. We both showed up for our t-shirts and registration, had the complimentary "survival dinner" ...I guess you would call it that, and then Derek walked the survivors lap. Its always fun to see him walk that lap and re-celebrate the fact that he is healthy and cancer free! We then continued to walk several laps and were able to see some friends and family and talk to them. Here are a few pictures from the event.

Walking the survivor lap

Letting go of the balloons

I love this guy... we are so happy he is happy and healthy.

Derek is frantically working this past week and this upcoming week to get all his assignments and projects  finished up. The semester is coming to a close very quickly and he is trying to keep his head above water with those things. This is his last week of classes and then he will have a few things on finals week. It will be good to have the semester over for him so that he can "relax" a bit. And when I mean relax a bit I just mean start working from 8-5 full time everyday. Summer is just around the corner and we are so excited.

I have also been frantically working on things for my online class as well as doing lots of paper work and IEP meetings at the school as the school year coming to an end. What a busy time of year... and time just flies. I am starting to slowly bring some things home from my classroom that I won't be needing for the rest of the year and clean things up there. It is weird to think that I am not going to be teaching next year. In order for me to be able to bring all these things home from my school - we need somewhere to store them... so we have been doing some serious spring cleaning and rearranging of the house to try and make room for school storage as well as a baby and all the things that come with a baby. I will share more about that sometime soon.

Life will calm down a bit when this semester is over and some of these big things start slowing down with my preschool. Until then, keep smiling and we will check back soon!

Baby Bump

Derek has made this really cool slideshow/gif/video thing to show the progression of my baby bump this far. Its so crazy to see the baby bump grow so big so quickly. Really, it does feel like it happens over night.

We had a great time listening to General Conference this past weekend and we were so excited and blessed to be able to hear that Cedar City is going to be having a temple built here. All the talks were so amazing. We love conference weekend and the chance that we have to spend time with family and hear words from the prophets and apostles to help guide our lives. My favorite was Elder Holland, he is just so passionate and powerful when he talks. What a great weekend.

We are in to a busy week here at the Payne house again and will update you again soon.

Baby Boy Payne, Buckets of Joy, and Easter Celebration

I had a short week at school and had Easter break the rest of the week. It was so nice to sleep in and do some things that I have been wanting to get done around the house. Derek still had work and school like normal but he had a very productive week and we had a lot of fun things this week that we were able to do.

Thursday especially was a fun day for us because we were able to find out the gender of our baby! If you don't know yet we are having a ..................baby boy! We are so excited. His name will be Keaton Max Payne and we are so thrilled to have a baby boy join our family soon. The ultrasound was really fun to see how much he has grown! We both had a feeling it would be a baby boy. We are so excited to have that special spirit enter our home and we are doing all we can now to help prepare to receive him and prepare to be his parents. Here is one of the pictures we got form the ultrasound. Just a good profile shot of Keaton.

Thursday night when we got home we were able to participate in Bucket of Joy day. This is the second annual Bucket of Joy holiday that we celebrate in honor of my cousin Jared Lyman who passed away last year of a brain tumor. He was always writing silly songs, one of those being called "Bucket of Joy" He talks about all of these things that he would have in a bucket of joy if he were to choose. So on his birthday we all put together "buckets of joy" and take it to a family in need. We were able to take it to a family who we know where the dad has been going through chemo/radiation to try and fight the cancer he was diagnosed with. He has several kids and out of a job. They were thrilled to receive their buckets of joy and we had a lot of fun taking them and talking to them. Here is a picture of us before we delivered out buckets of joy.

We had our annual Mother Of All Easter Egg Hunts on Friday. It is always fun to get together with all our family and participate in the family traditions that we always form great memories with. We had dinner, did the kids Easter Egg Hunt, and then the adult Easter Egg Hunt. It was another great day with lots of laughs and fun. Here is a picture of all my nieces and nephews before their Easter Egg Hunt.

We are especially grateful for our Savior, Jesus Christ at this time of year and the great sacrifice that he has made in all of our behalf. We are thankful for our close relationship with him and we feel his love each and everyday in our lives. We are greatly blessed and are so thankful for all of the many blessings the gospel brings into our lives.

We have also been able to spend some time with friends and do some fun things with them this week. Tomorrow is back to school and back to reality after such a nice break.

The Nesting has Started and in Full Swing

Since finding out that we are pregnant, the nesting mother in me has come out more that I thought it would. My mom and I bought a few baby outfits just to get things started, I have started making a crib quilt, I have picked out some nursery colors, and making some big plans for the babies room. Here are a few pictures of a few of the things I have started to do. I will continue to post as I finish things up.

I wanted to choose something "cheery" for the baby room. I liked the primary colors mixture and thought it would go for girl or boy.

wall hanging for the nursery

I still have to bind the quilt, but its almost finished.

A boy outfit (just in case), a neutral outfit, and a girl outfit (just in case).

Derek has been sick this week. I think everyone knows when someone is sick in the house it kinda feels like you need to slow down, but life doesn't. He has been really good though to still to try to work on homework and go to a few classes even though he hasn't felt that hot.

Derek had a good spring break. He was still busy working, doing some homework, and doing things around the house to help out, but it was a bit more relaxing for him and not so demanding. We were able to spend some time with family and friends that were in town during his spring break and that was fun too.

I am getting bigger and bigger. I have grown a lot this week and had to go maternity clothes shopping for a few things.  I will post pictures next week of my growth through the weeks.

Thats all from us this week. Until next week...

Quilts, Moving, and More

I am finally getting around to updating our blog for the past week or so. It seems like every night the past couple weeks we have had some kind of project going on, out of town, or somewhere we needed to be which didn't allow me to update as quickly and kind of put us behind in our lives so we are just now catching up. Last week we decided to put up a quilt to tie for a new blanket for our bed (which is badly needed). It is a massive quilt. and very heavy. I have to finish binding it but we are excited to get it on the bed and start using it. Its very comfy. These are some of the pictures from us binding the quilt. Derek's parents let us borrow their living room, their quilting frames, and their help and we all quilted while watching a movie for Family Home Evening that night. We had a lot of fun and it got done pretty quick. 

The rest of the week was filled with the usual scheduled events that we have with meetings, work, and homework. 

I will say last Friday wasn't my luckiest day, and with my pregnancy hormones in full swing my emotions were getting the best of me most of the day. Friday afternoon I left work a little early to come into town and find my boss to let her know my decision that I would not be coming back to teach next year. It was a really rough decision that I have been trying to avoid because part of me really wants to stay at my dream job and keep working, but the other part of me (which is my gut feeling of the right thing to do) is to just stay home and be a mom to my new little baby coming soon. It is what I have always wanted to do and its a scary point in my life to move onto but we are so excited to start our family. It is a bitter-sweet feeling to leave the job that I have been so blessed to have. I was VERY emotional telling my boss my decision and then to make matters worse I got pulled over on the way to tell her which put me even more on edge. The officer I think felt badly too because as hard as I was trying to hold back my emotions it just wasn't working out well for me. He was very thoughtful and nice, but then he still gave me a ticket :(. I have taken traffic school online this week to try and get things fixed that way and now hopefully that will get put behind me. 

After calming myself down a bit and coming to grips with what I needed to do the rest of the day we got in the car and headed up with Derek's parents to Springville. We spent the weekend up there helping Derek's sister move into her families new temporary town home until their house is done being built. I didn't do much moving and lifting of heavy boxes, but we all sure did work hard packing things up and hauling things over to her new place. It was exhausting. Derek was even more exhausted than I because of all the heavy lifting involved. 

We got home Saturday night to clean things up a bit and get unpacked and then we were ready for another busy day Sunday with my moms big annual event...Her piano recitals. It may not seem like a big deal to most of you, but you won't understand until you have been to one of my moms piano recitals. There are two of them back to back and the refreshments afterwards is probably bigger than the refreshments served at my wedding reception. It is a big production that takes her and others over a week to prepare for with just the food. She has about 55 students and from setting up for the recital to taking down it was about an 8 hour event for our whole family to try and tackle. We did have fun and it was a success.

After moving family and being on our feet for 8 hours the next day helping with this huge event we were exhausted. We are still trying to fully recover but we are doing well and life is good. See you next week.