Dan and I have been friends for a long time with Ava’s parents, Jenny and Matt Parker. Dan went to high school with Jenny, and I grew up with Jenny in the church. We’ve stayed close and I even had the honor of singing at Matt and Jenny’s wedding a few years ago. It was only natural that we remain close after Ava was born, and although Matt and Jenny live in Macon (they are hoping to move back to Griffin soon), we try to get together as much as possible.

We were thrilled to be invited to celebrate Ava’s 1st birthday. Dan was out of town, but Brittain and I made the trip to Macon and had a fabulous time. And, let me tell you, this party was done up right! Keeping with Ava’s hot pink and black nursery theme, Ava’s cake, decorations and even the party favors kept these colors. It was a great party with family and friends and we were so happy to be a part of it. Thanks for having us, y’all!

Jenny, Matt and the birthday girl:

For some reason, it seemed that the hit gift was this Dora the Explorer ride. Brittain absolutely loved it, so of course I had to go and buy her one right after the party:

I LOVE this face!:

Perhaps it was the large crowd that made Brittain cling to me as soon as we walked in the door. Here I was carrying around this 25 pound child in my left arm and attempting to take pictures with my right arm. She finally warmed up to 2 people in the room, Amanda and then Ava’s daddy, Matt.

I am SO excited! Dan knows how much I’ve been enjoying photographing Brittain at every opportunity. So, for my birthday, he surprised me with a new camera. We had to go through a couple of camera exchanges after trying them out and realizing they weren’t what we were looking for, but yesterday Dan gave me THE camera. It’s a Nikon Digital SLR and it is awesome! I know nothing about it yet, but I couldn’t help myself the last couple of days, testing it out…and you know who I chose my model to be!

Okay, it wouldn’t be fair to take credit for the next 3 pictures. Dan took these when I “allowed” him to play with the camera for a few minutes :-):

At Mimi and Duke’s:

This morning before we left for church:

We picked Mimi up on the way and took these next few pics at her house:

Fun-time after church:

Yeah…I took these myself as well…not so easy:

By now, most of you have seen the slideshow of pictures that Shawna took of Brittain (and some of her family :-)) a couple of weeks ago. I won’t go into again how much I think of Shawna and the gift she has with photography (especially with children), but I did want to post some of the pictures from the day so that it would be documented on the blog. I decided I was just going to choose my favorites since there were over 250 photos in all. But, as I’m sure you guessed, I had way too many favorites. So, these are a selection of my favorites. It was incredibly difficult to narrow it down!

Thanks again, Shawna, for making my birthday one of the best yet!