Spring is for Change

You remember hearing stories about our great-grandmothers tearing the house apart from top to bottom the moment they saw green come up from the ground; pounding mattresses on their front porch, scrubbing cabinets and dusting those hidden nooks and crannies; rearranging, renewing, bringing back to life.

Here in the Payne household, we've gone through a somewhat vestigial renewal of our own. Although I can't imagine spending my time this spring cleaning every square inch of the house, our home is going through some renewal and change.

Around the middle of February, I started our garden. I dug, potted, watered, doted, watched and lo and behold, we have lots of young green plants around the house and in the bed outside. It's wonderful! Hopefully, we'll be eating spinach, lettuce, nasturtium leaves, radishes and carrots soon. Have you ever seen a dry, hard, round thing magically produce an actual plant? To see this seedling push through the soil and grow toward the light- with part of the seed still clinging on? It really was almost like magic for me!

Three weeks ago, I came home with 5 baby girls. For Kelly McIntyre's sake, I will correct myself and (although I love to personify) admit that they weren't girls, they were female. Female chickens. We've been enjoying raising them. Today they're spending time outside in the backyard. They grow so quickly!

And almost a week ago, we brought home a real little girl. :) Our niece, Karina, will be staying with us for awhile. This week I've been cleaning out drawers, organizing rooms and rearranging furniture. We're hoping that while she's here, she'll be as comfortable as possible. Last night, she spent her first night in her and Joseph's room, in her bed. Although she was timid about it, she awoke with the good news that she had fallen asleep, and in fact loved her bed. :)

So, that's quite a bit of remaking our household. I love spring. :)

As an update on Joseph:

He's definitely "crawling". This past week (see pic below) it would seem that he was getting from point A to point B, but I really couldn't tell how he was doing it. He wasn't lunging, not necessarily scooting or crawling, but he was getting there. (Karina says he was doing push ups.) Now, you can definitely tell that he's crawling.

And yesterday I walked in to find that he had pulled up on the crib rail! His first time to pull up! But before I had time to savor the milestone, I put him down for his nap just a bit ago and he went from laying down to sitting up just like that! So, now he knows how to do that! My boy is growing so much! Maybe that's a plus when you have a smallish baby?