family pictures

tender mercy...

Today I went shopping with my mom for an outfit for her to wear to our family pictures. We found her a super cute shirt and cardigan right in the nick of time.

thankful for...

I'm thankful that when I was walking around the house without my glasses on this morning, I noticed a dark spot on our dark carpet and decided to check it out instead of walking over it with my bare feet. And just to be clear, when I don't have my glasses on everything that's more than 2 feet away from my face is blurry, so the fact that I even noticed a spot is saying something. It was a spider. One of those huge, brown, hairy ones. I'm thankful that it didn't grow. For some reason I always expect them to when they're already big and scary. I'm thankful that there was a clear cup nearby that I could put over it and a screwdriver to weigh down the cup so he couldn't walk off with it. The clear cup is nice because I can check in on him to make sure he hasn't escaped (because obviously it would run straight inside my bed). However, I am not thankful that no one has volunteered to release this thing into the wild or kill it for me. I have to walk in a big U when I go in the basement to avoid accidentally knocking my trap over and having it jump on my leg... Otherwise that cup is going to be there until December 9th when I get back and have convinced myself it's safe.

made me laugh...

While we were taking family pictures today, we were trying to get baby Lola to smile. Rachel told us she likes the song "When you're happy and you know it." Immediately Mom and Sarah started singing at the same time. Baby started laughing and gave us some really cute pictures. Later the photographer sang a solo when taking a picture of our whole family to get her to smile again. It made all of us laugh, not just the baby.

I learned...

I learned that butterflies have tongues. Big, long ones that curl up when they're just relaxing and uncurl when they're sitting on my hand licking my ring.