my family twelve times | january

If you've never seen Tara Whitney's work, you need to check her out right now. She's amazing. My absolute favorite portrait photographer of all time. Her images are so authentic and true to her clients... I can't get enough! And her family is absolutely adorable.

On her blog, she just decided to post a photo of her entire family once a month and include some things that are happening in their lives at the time. She invited her blog readers to join her in the endeavor, and I love, love, LOVE the idea.

So... Here's our first family picture. I'm actually cheating because it was shot in December for our Christmas card, but I'm going to allow myself to cheat for the first month! Getting myself into the photo is always tricky...

January | at a glance.

-- Maggie has started saying things in three's. It's adorable, and I have no idea where it comes from. When I tell her she needs to wash her hands, this follows: "Are they dirty and dirty and dirty?" Yesterday, when Tim asked her to sit down (instead of jumping up and down on her seat) she said: "I'm just being silly and silly and silly!" Cute.

-- Caleb smiles pretty easily, but any time he sends a grin our way you'd think we won the lottery for all the screams that we let out. Maggie is the loudest. "He smiling at me! He smiling, Mommy!" So sweet.

-- Tim finished two incredibly hard things... Graduate school and our basement. I'm so proud of him! I'm also relieved.

-- Caleb sleeps through the night. Most of the time.

-- Every night before bed, Maggie requests to pray for three friends. Jack and Rowan and Brandon. Every night. She also picks out several books for us to read to her, and right now she enjoys reading about ballerinas. She practices her ballet during the day. She calls it "Baa-yay".

-- I celebrated my 29th birthday. This year I'm making a resolution to cook more often. I love it, but I rarely give myself enough time.

-- Apparently, Maggie is incredibly proud of Tim and me. Whenever we complete a task, like brushing our teeth or putting away the dishes, she claps her hands and says, "Yay! I'm so proud of you!"

-- Caleb and Maggie are really cute in the morning. And the first words out of Maggie's mouth in the morning are always the same. "Are Caleb's eyes awake?" Every morning. But it actually sounds more like this: "Are Cayub's eyes wake?" So sweet.

-- After all this snow, we're getting pretty excited about the Spring.

-- Thanks for reading! Do you like this idea? If so, you should do it too! For me it's really easy to blog about my job, but I end up forgetting about the new things that are going on in my family. I love the idea of bringing them both together.