odd thoughts

I was looking through some gift catalogs yesterday and I came across a picture frame that said this on it "Friends are the family we choose for ourselves." Is that weird to anyone else? I thought, "Well, how do we know we didn't choose our family to begin with?" And "What's wrong with not being able to choose our family?" I guess it was meant positively, like we get to add our friends to "family" status and that's nice, but it just left me wondering. Then, this morning Ella pushed Alex and I gave her a big consequence. She started listing all the ways in which I was being unfair and selfish and how she can't wait to be a mom so that she can tell her kids what to do. I explained that I was sad to have a kid who pushed and that she had to have a consequence for making a bad decision. I said it's my job to teach her that it's not okay to push someone and she argued it was okay for kids to. I said, "What if I went and pushed my friend across the street? She wouldn't be my friend anymore. She probably wouldn't talk to me ever again." I then said how lucky she was that in her family she can make a mistake and her brothers will still want to play with her again and that they could forgive her. It made me think about that picture frame and feel pretty lucky that I'm stuck with a bunch of people I didn't "choose" to be my family and that they forgive me when I make mistakes and love me anyway (most of the time). ;)