An Unexpected Blessing Along the Way...

Day after day, Shawn Thomas, Mason and I become more acutely aware of how blessed we are with the people that have been placed in our lives.  We've always known we are loved and felt it.  But with the news of quadruplets, this has become even more evident.  These blessings have show themselves in a myriad of different ways...friends babysitting or clipping coupons, a diaper drive, a QUAD shower from church, daily prayer, the list goes on and on...
Over Christmas, we received a blessing we never dreamed of!  As I was sitting at my parents home still working on getting through my first trimester of carrying quadruplets, I checked my gmail and found a message from someone I didn't know.  Her name is Sarah Kane...that's all I knew from the subject line. When I opened the message, with it came a huge blessing.  A friend of mine had let Sarah, a passionate photographer, teacher, artist, and of course: mom,  know about our news and this is what her message said...

"An anonymous photographer started something called The Olivia Act named after one of the children killed in Newtown. Olivia’s family had family pictures taken a short time before she was killed. Those pictures are precious and now priceless to them. Upon hearing this, this photographer was moved to give away a family photo shoot and has challenged other photographers to do the same."

Sarah, of Dia Marie Photography, accepted this challenge and, in her true fashion, actually took it a few steps further.  Sarah asked to follow us on this quadruplet journey, photographing our family along the way...this means from now until the Fabulous Four are one year old, Sarah will be documenting our lives and love that we share for one another.  Obviously, I had to read the email several times to actually compute that a complete stranger (at the time!) would want to offer our family such a gift.

 Since then, Sarah has gotten to know our family and started her part of the journey with us.  These shots are from our first family shoot with her back in January.  I was 18 weeks pregnant at the time.  I gaze at these shots now and think, "Wow, look how small I was!"  But more importantly, I look at them and can say, we're still smiling and loving each other!

Sarah actually let Mason take this one.  We love it for so many reasons!

Eating from Mommy's childhood bowl

Sarah has and will continue to capture this journey for us; and for that, we are forever grateful.  Sarah is a lovely example of using your gifts and talents to do what you love and pass that along for others to be blessed by it.  We count her in our blessings!

Here are links to Sarah's blog and her Facebook page.