Some Random Thoughts

I have to start this post out with this photo--Steve took Samantha to Pentagon City this morning expressly to have her photo taken with Santa. Unfortunately, she was tired and cranky and refused to smile for the camera, but he managed to get a few cute shots. Of course, to take any of our own photos we have to purchase one of their photo packages. 26 bucks later and a rather funny look later (this photo was taken with our own camera--the official version is quite funny and looks like Samantha has her mouth open to say exactly what's on her mind!) we have the first of our 2008 holiday memories. Is it weird that we had a photo taken with Santa and it's not even Thanksgiving yet? I love this Santa--we had Samantha's photo taken with him two years ago, but for some reason never got around to it last year. She was quite taken with him today, and kept walking back over to him to touch him after the photo was over. Luckily there was no line of people waiting... She's been taking the photo every chance she gets and just stares at it, saying "Danta."

I got to leave work early today. It was an absolute ghost town in there, as I'm sure many workplaces across America were. I went over to the mall to put some things on hold at Children's Place to pick up Friday morning. For any of you Children's Place shoppers, they're having an additional 20% off everything in the store as their early bird special Friday morning until 11am, and you can combine it with your 15% coupon (you can Google "Children's Place coupon" and print one off the internet or you may have received one in the mail...). I am a hopeless bargain shopper. Things usually have to cost next to nothing for me to buy them. Discounts on top of discounts on top of discounts usually get my attention pretty quickly.

Samantha had her usual 6-month appointment with Dr. Lewanda last month and her bloodwork came back weird for her thyroid tests. This would make perfect sense to us since school had been reporting that she'd been unusually tired in the mornings for a few weeks, and had been more tired than usual at home. However, she may be going through a growth spurt and she has 4 molars working their way in, so that may account for some of her crabbiness. We had the bloodwork re-done last week, and today we got the call that the levels had gone back within the normal range again. Weird. And she's been fine at school lately, too. I've heard from other people that thyroid levels can fluctuate and confuse the heck out of people. We'll just have to be extra vigilant.

I'm sure I had more that I'd wanted to say, but I'm now struggling to keep my eyes open. I'll post a "Things I'm Thankful For" list tomorow at some point, either post-coffee in the morning or in a food coma in the evening. I bet each would produce completely different list items, too. Maybe I should do both...

Oh, here's another question for you...in addition to the "Angel" b&w image I want to use as my holiday card image (scroll down to Halloween), I'm contemplating the one below. Please let me know your thoughts!