Beautiful Girls

My sister Megan enjoys using my daughters as models to practice her photography skills, so all of these pictures are courtesy of her. She typically asks my permission before doing little mini photo shoots with my girls, and always asks for my opinion of the pictures afterwards. These are some of my favorites from her most recent endeavors. She told me that she had taken a few "naked" baby pictures of Lynnea,

and asked me if this was OK. At first I looked at her kind of funny thinking "Of course it's OK -- pictures of babies in nothing but a diaper are almost always super sweet and cute" and then she showed me the pictures, and I understood why she had asked. For just a moment, I had forgotten all about all of Lynnea's scars and markings. When I saw the pictures, I admit that at first I was a little disappointed -- not at Meg's skills as a photographer, but at the thought that Lynnea will never have those super cute "naked" pictures. I confessed these thoughts to Megan and she said that she could always switch the pictures to black and white using Photoshop, and then Lynnea's scars would hardly show at all. This is probably true, but after spending a little more time looking at the pictures, I am able to see all of Lynnea's beauty, even with her scars, and her feeding tube. These are her battle scars; she earned them in a battle for her life. I hope that as she grows older, she can always look back at them with pride. I hope that both of my little girls always know how beautiful they really are.