a perfect evening

jared's finally starting to mend from his strep, i'll probably be feeling 100% tomorrow save a scratchy voice. alena woke up this morning about 6:30am. we saw our friends off as they left for florida (hopefully without a souvenir of strep for themselves...) we put alena back down for a nap around 9:30am and then we went back to sleep. do you know, that little girl let us rest until 12:30? what a trooper! i think she slept a couple of those hours, but she was quiet and looked at her books or played with her doll until we got her up. she's been in a great mood and content to lay low today.

so this evening, around 5pm, we thought we'd go in the backyard to let her play a little since she's been cooped up inside all day. we have an amazing tree in our backyard. it's huge and in the fall all the leaves turn bright yellow. when they fall, we have a ton of leaves on the ground. incredible. so with the last bit of twilight, we went outside, jared and i in our funky PJs that we've lounged around in for a couple days. we should've grabbed the video camera. she was almost knee-deep in leaves and was LOVING IT!!! the temp was in the upper 60s, so it was still warm and it just smelled like fall outside, you know?

we just finished watching marley and me and i was thinking that it was a great picture of their marriage and family and just life. i knew it was a love story with the dog, but i kept waiting for the marriage to fall apart or something and it never did. what a great life. tonight, as we're watching alena delight in the leaves, jared said "we could take 5 minute snippets of our life and make a great movie too, you know."

yes, i know. and tonight was one of those moments.