I just now noticed that everytime I celebrate a family birthday out here, I make it a point to capitalize every letter in the phrase as the title of the post. Actually, I didn't just now notice it. I do that on purpose and have been for a while. One of my many pet peeves on The Book is when people have a status reading "I'm screaming happy birthday to so-and-so". Do you really have to say you're screaming it? All caps pretty much does that sufficiently. That effectively conveys that you're yelling to stress the importance of something. Thus, the reason I always do all caps in these instances.
Anyway, y'all wouldn't believe how long I searched for just the right picture to use here for Mom's birthday. I'll be honest, I would have gotten this post up a lot sooner if it wasn't for that small problem. The thing is that I wanted to make sure to use a picture that I hadn't shown before. That gets harder and harder to do each year because Mom isn't a fan of having her picture taken. Therefore, some of my pics are a little older than I would like.
If I was smart, what I would have done is taken more pictures when I was in Kansas City with the family a couple of weekends ago for the mini-reunion. I fully intended to utilize the opportunity to get more updated pics while I was there. However, I got there and ended up enjoying my family too much to achieve that photo goal. It was a good trade-off since I hadn't seen many of them in quite a while. I'll have to try better next time when I go to the full year reunion in Arkansas at the end of the summer.
So I ended up using this photo from a trip that Mom and Dad made to Des Moines when I was still living there. It happened to coincide with a same weekend that Mariah and Elijah were visiting from Texas. As much as I hate over-utilizing the crop feature, I didn't have a choice in this instance. Mariah's part in this photo became a casualty when I saw the perfect opportunity to use a good picture of Mom as her birthday post.
Personally, I think any photo of Mom is a beautiful picture. Simply because she's a beautiful person inside and out. I don't blame her one bit for for not wanting to get her photo taken much. I'm the same way. Yet another trait that I inherited from her. The difference being that I'm only beautiful on the outside. Yes..I know...it ain't easy being this modest.