When Talia started at her new daycare, they sent home a list of things that they wanted us to bring in. One of the items on the list was a family picture. I started to think about it, and I realized that we have not had a real family picture taken since before Talia was born! We keep putting it off for one reason or another. So, I decided to just do it, no matter what. One of those 'whats' was that Jessica is down in UT for college, so she couldn't join us, but I just knew that if we waited around forever for everything to be just perfect, then we would never do it.
I decided what outfit I wanted to wear, and used that to declare that everyone had to be wearing outfits in either red, black, or white, or some combination thereof. I told Dusty to talk to the kids and tell them to bring their nice clothes, which he did. But they all forgot. I refused to let that stop us, so I took all of the kids to DI and bought new clothes for all of them except for Sarah who just happened to be wearing an outfit that was perfect. Unfortunately, they didn't have black shoes in everyone's sizes, so we went to Wal-Mart and bought a new pair for those that needed them.
We went down to the Greenbelt, on the library side of the bridge, where the Sister-City garden is. Right after we got there, I saw this neat little island across a little stream, and I thought that it would be a great place to take a picture of all of the kids together. Unfortunately, the little girls couldn't get across by themselves, so I was helping them, when I slipped and fell into the stream, scraping my leg on lava rock on the way down! All of that effort put into clothes and looking nice, and my legs were soaking wet and my backside was covered in mud. It was very muddy and wet in the area where we were, so we all got a little muddy by the end of the afternoon. Oh, well!
We went with it. My mom and dad showed up, and Dad took pictures of all of us together. Unfortunately, Petra had thrown up that morning (though she was fine by this point in the day) and Talia had a fever, and we didn't get many smiles out of her.
In the end, we had to photoshop a couple of smiling faces into a shot to make everyone look happy, but I am pretty pleased with the results.
