MARK HAYDEN HAS ARRIVED

Mark Hayden was born this morning at 7:51 am. Sarah and Cody got up at 3:30 am to get ready for the trip to the hospital. I thought I was up most of the night waiting for them to get up but I must have fallen into a sound sleep just before time, so Sarah had to awaken me and I had just enough time to hop into my clothes and brush my teeth before we left. I had this bedhead spot in the back of my head all day that made me look a little like a Monk. There was a time when I would never have ventured out of the house like that. That's the beauty of age you don't worry about stuff like bedhead.

Mark Hayden is a beautiful baby with lots of dark hair and a perfectly round head. That is one good thing about a c-section baby, they come into the world with rosy skin and no cone shaped heads. He sucks his fingers already and apparently was born hungry. I took as many pictures as I could, but I am no competition for the other Grandma.

I came back to the house this afternoon so Sarah and Cody could have some time alone with Mark Hayden. Luke and Charlotte are sad that they can't go into the hospital to visit. With flu season in full swing, the hospital doesn't allow anyone under 12 years of age. Hopefully everyone will be home by the weekend. Maybe the snow won't keep them from coming home Saturday.

It is a relief to have No. 10 here and healthy

WAITING ON THE STORK TO ARRIVE

We are still waiting on the arrival of new baby Mark Hayden. I think it may be harder on Maw Maw and Grandaddy waiting on the birth than it is Sarah and Cody. I have had my clothes stacked on the dresser in our bedroom for a couple of weeks now. I would put them in the suitcase, but I would just have to keep digging them out to find something to wear.

Sarah is scheduled to have a c-section on the 28Th, but we were all sure that she would go earlier. I guess we were all wrong, the 28Th is just a week away. I am not the best at the waiting game. I find myself getting more and more nervous. It is like listing to water drip. Your mind gets totally caught up in waiting for the phone to ring, then when it does you about jump out of you skin. We are just getting so excited.

As fate would have it two out of three of the cars we have went kerplunk this week. John spent all of today putting a new radiator on one and the battery went out on the other. If we take the van, we will need a couple of new tires. So while I worry about the birthing process, John is worrying about keeping a car running long enough to get us there. I guess it all goes back to the vow he made with God before we were married.

We will probably be out of pocket for a few days starting next week. When we I get back I will post pictures of Mark Hayden. In the mean time I continue to wait. DRIP..Drip....drip.

GRAND KIDS, THEY ARE ALL DIFFERENT

I started back to work Monday. It was great having three weeks off for the holidays. We stayed pretty busy the whole time and actually had all the family home for the New Year's holiday.

Our family is growing with leaps and bounds. Daniel was born in August and Mark Hayden will be here by the end of the month. That will make 10 in all with 8 boys and 2 girls. This is wonderful. Lots of people to take care of us in our old age.

It is funny how all the kids are so different. JP our oldest is still very loving at 13, but you begin to wonder how much longer he is going to want to hang out with the grandparents. Right now he seems very comfortable with us, because at thirteen, he thinks we are a little crazy. Emily is very smart and such a good reader. Emily was our only grand daughter for a long time. She is not as affectionate with us now as she was when she was younger, but is glad to have us available to answer her beck and call, and believe me she can keep us both busy.

Andrew is super smart and will probably have Musial talent. He is into boy scouts and just made the school play. Matthew is probably going to venture off into the wild and become the next Indiana Jones. He is not crazy about school and wants to be grown up before his time. You just want to tell him to slow down and enjoy being a kid. Aaron is a little stand offish with us. It takes him a little longer to warm up to us when we visit, but once he does he lets his hair down. Andrew and Matthew are the ones I have to fuss at the most when they visit, but when they leave they cling to us and the tears flow. Maybe they just love to hear Maw Maw fuss and scold.

David and Daniel are the two grand kids we have spent less time with. David is quite the little man and talks big and tells you everything he can think of and more. Daniel is just 5 months old and is all snugly and smiles. That is a wonderful age to bond with a child. He is a really tall baby. He is average in all his percentile measurements except 25% in weight and 95% in height. I guess he will be tall and thin like his dad.

Luke and Charlotte have been with us the most. Luke has lots of common sense and if you tell him to go move something or carry something, he goes and does it without asking how or why. I guess he has a lot of Nebraska farm boy in his genes. Charlotte is our little miss Pris. She is one of those little girls that is just born with the girlie nature. She likes to dress up, have tea parties and play with dolls. We are now waiting to see what Mark Hayden's personality will be like. Our wait is getting shorter each day. He will be born at the end of the month.

I guess no matter how many you have, there will be a different personality to go along with each one of them.

I HATE WINTER

The weather here in Alabama is extremely cold for the south. We have been holed up in the house for two days now and I am starting to go stir crazy. I know most people would love to have a couple of days to just lay around the house and do nothing but for some reason this really gets to me. It is not that we haven't done anything the last couple of weeks, we spent five days at the group lodge with family and friends. Then when we got back on Sunday and unpacked everything and had a good nights sleep, we left Monday and spent two days in Tunica MS. We usually do this to celebrate our anniversary. This is always my idea, because I love playing the slots. John goes along with the plan because I am easier to live with if I get my way.

We did have a great time and probably needed the time away with just the two of us. We stayed at the Hollywood Casino hotel. They have the deep memory foam beds, so we rested well. We spent a few hours at the Outlet Mall looking around. I found a blouse and John got a new pair of shoes. I'm not much of a shopper. I see thing that looks great on the rack but when I try it on, it looses something in the translation.

We spent a little time at Fitzgrarld's. If you go, head up the escalator. When you get to the top there will be some eletronic games along the wall to the left. They are called Platium something or other. They may be new, because they were paying off. We must have set and played for three or four hours. John would have won pretty well if I hadn't kept asking for money:) We started to stay two more nights, but then decided to come home since the weather was supposed to get bad. We got home about 7:00pm on Wednesday.

Thursday morning we awoke to a dusting of snow. Now I know that sounds like nothing to some parts of the country. But when we have snow here, the roads are not treated with salt and whatever else they put on the roads. It usually rains, then freezes, then a little snow on top of the ice and suddenly it is slick a goose poop. School was out in our whole area. Some work places closed down to keep people off the roads. The temp. this morning was 12 degrees and now at 5:49 PM it is 21 degrees. Hopefully tomorrow will be a nice day. I will be happy just to go to the grocery store.

John made a few pictures for me. As you can see it is just a cold, gray, miserable day. It makes me long for the nice hot days of summer, with just a touch of persperation glistening on your forehead and a big glass of ice tea sitting next to you while you're lounging in the hammock. AWWW!!!!

IT WAS A WONDERFUL NEW YEAR CELEBRATION

Since our family has grown so much in the last few years, it is almost impossible to get all the kids and grand kids into our three bedroom house. With five kids, their spouses or significant other and nine grand children it was time to find a bigger place. Luckily we were able to rent a group lodge with thirteen bedrooms and twenty six beds. This was like a dream come true for me. There was a long hall that ran from one end of the building to the other and the little kids were in hog heaven. They must have run a marathon while we were there, all of them racing up and down the hall playing tag and playing with the toys they had available to them.

The weather was really cold while we were there, but the kids managed to get out and do a little fishing, Frisbee football and John Pearson and Andrew even slept out in Andrew's new tent one night. The men watched a lot of football and the women had a little time to catch up on gossip. Sandra and I put out meals for everyone. Lucky for us it had a commercial kitchen so we were able to cook everything quicker. One morning we made about a hundred pancakes with sausage and bacon.

New Year's day we fed forty people for breakfast then that evening we had a traditional New Year's meal of hog jowl, black eyed peas and turnip greens. Just so everyone would be happy we cooked a pork loin, fried okra and Mac and cheese. We decided if anyone went away hungry, it was their own fault.

Our New Year's get to gathers have been taking place for almost forty years now. The Kriegers and Sundquist started the tradition when we had five children between us and we would take turns each year having it at each others house. Then as the kids got older we stopped staying over. Then we back on the road during the holiday and worried about someone having an accident. Now there are twenty of our family and fourteen in theirs so it was time to move on to bigger and better places.

If you want to every entertain a house full of kids let them play bingo. Monica and Suzanne bought a whole mess of gifts from the Dollar Tree and Big Lots and Sandra brought a bingo set including the roller basket and the little ones had a blast. Once they had bingoed they couldn't bingo again until everyone bingoed. You could just see the excitement as they waited for their number to be called.

I don't know how we crammed so much into four days. We even managed to have Daniel baptized after mass on New Year's eve. This is another tradition our families have. We always go to mass on New Year's eve. It gives you a sense of peace to finish the year with your family sitting next to you in church and then get up on New Year's day and have them with you to start the next year. I don't know how many more years the younger members of our families will be interested in these get-to-gethers, but as of right now, I think they are all still enjoying them.

Thank God for another blessed year and we wish for the same in the year to come.