…going to be announced later today.  I’m working with a few other local photographers to possibly have them photograph the 2nd, 3rd, and possibly 4th place entries!  We might actually have four winners this year!!!!  Hang out for a few more hours, I’ll post it up as soon as we have it worked out!  Thanks for your patience, it will be worth the wait!

In all the places we have lived in our 9 years of marriage, we have had the privileged of living in two houses where 4th of July fireworks could be viewed from the yard!  I’ve always enjoyed a good fireworks show and I’ve seen them in many places around the country, but I never knew how nice it would be to see them without the huge crowds and traffic (especially when young kids are involved!).  So this year, we invited some of our family to a little cookout and we enjoyed the company of some good friends as well for the fireworks later in the evening.  I originally had grand plans of whipping out the tripod and capturing award-winning fireworks pictures, but that was before I had a clear picture in my mind of what having 10 adults, 4 kids, and 3 newborns in the backyard was really going to be like!  The real version of what transpired, however, was much more exciting and interesting than me pressing the shutter on my tripodded (new word) camera.  Here are some of my favorite images from the evening (well, except that the first image is from earlier in the day – I couldn’t resist).

Of course, we had to bust out the sparklers!

Aunt Charlotte, the entertainer, wowed us with her ability to hula hoop around her neck while waving a sparkler!

Our friends, the Eckerts, brought their kids over and the boys gave the sparklers a try.

Once our girls realized that the fireworks were not coming towards them and they were safe, they loved the show!

I obviously didn’t have my tripod out there and I didn’t have time to get my strobe or setup off-camera lighting, so I have a ton of shots like this.  The pop-up flash on my camera is decent in a severe pinch, but I don’t use it that often.  But this is the great thing about photography.  Even an underexposed, blurry shot like this is special to me because it documents our first July 4th as a family of five.  I love this moment (even if I don’t particularly love the technical aspects of the photo!).

Once the show was over, we had to get a photo of the three newborns together.  Two of our friends from church had babies one week on either side of Zach!  Getting three babies under one-month old to cooperate is a bit challenging so we did the best we could.  Notice Zach on the left is spending the evening in the same manner he spends most of his days!

The really good news is that the house we’re moving into at the end of this month is less than 1/2 a mile from where these fireworks happen so next year we should have a front-row seat to the action!  Let us know if you want to come over and hang out!  We’re taking reservations starting now.

It’s been nearly three weeks since I’ve posted anything about the Davis family and I realized that might seem like an eternity to those who are wanting to see more baby pictures!  One reason it’s been so long is that for the past two weeks, I’ve been shooting a lot of film that has yet to be developed.  Remember the good old days of having to wait to see your pictures?  I’m enjoying the challenge of shooting with an old manual film camera.  I just hope the pictures are looking okay since it’s been a long time since I’ve done it!

At any rate, we are loving our summer and we’re being quite productive considering that we are in the midst of adjusting to life as a family of five!  Our little Zach is quite the dream baby, which is pretty crucial for a third baby I’d say!  He sleeps VERY well at night, he eats well, he’s healthy, and he doesn’t really cry unless he’s starving!  This is how he spends most of his days.  Notice the man-hands!

The girls also started swimming lessons this week and are having a blast!  They both take a separate class, but at the same time which is nice on the parents!  We’ve had gorgeous weather this week, and it was actually only 70 degrees this morning at the start of their lessons.  They braved the cold water and we brought the long-sleeve shirts for afterward!  I couldn’t believe I was putting a sweater on my daughter on July 1!

Sarah and Zach came out this morning to watch the action!  We’re getting out a little more each day with him – he even made his first appearance at the park this afternoon!

One thing we are being reminded of is how much life has to slow down with a newborn.  I had forgotten about all those moments of waiting in the car for a baby to finish nursing or having to do a diaper lap-change in the front seat.  It’s been a while!

Last night Sarah made brownies.  Our household Sweet-tooth asked to lick the bowl.  This used to be my job and now I must allow the tradition to be passed on.  It’s a hard pill to swallow, but at least Kyla is taking her job seriously!

We’re having a great time and the girls are loving their new brother!  I’ll do my best to keep you updated a bit more throughout the summer!

This time of year brings about a strong mix of emotions in my life.  May 26th is our anniversary!  July 5th is our youngest daughter’s birthday!  The end of the school year!  The beginning of summer!  Those are all such joy-filled experiences.  The beginning of June, though, is also the anniversary of one of the hardest times in my life.  For those of you who know us well, you remember that my mother passed away 4 years ago.  We were living in Los Angeles, and I flew back to Virginia to visit her in the hospital and the last time I saw her was on June 5.  Those last moments with her play in my mind often, but especially at this time of year.  She passed away on June 12, a week after I visited her.  A little over two weeks after she died, our daughter Avery was born!  Talk about a huge pull on the emotions.  Well, we now have one more event to mark at this time of year, and it’s amazing to all of us that God chose June 12 to be the birthday of our son Zachary Christopher Davis!  He was born yesterday morning at 6:04AM weighing in at 8lbs 11oz!  This new birthday to celebrate is surely meant to be a comfort to our family.  The name Zachary means “God has remembered” and so far this little guy has lived up to his name!

Zachary’s birth yesterday was certainly an amazing experience.  Sarah is certainly one tough lady and delivered Zach at home with the unbelievably wonderful support of Brynne and Deren of The Mountain View Midwives.  We discovered the benefits of homebirth with the birth of our second daughter in Los Angeles and we were thrilled when we found Brynne and Deren’s practice when we moved to Charlottesville.  Sarah has come to believe in the homebirth experience so much that she enrolled in midwifery school at the beginning of this year!  Within the next few years, she’ll be delivering babies too!

Thankfully, we’ve scheduled a pretty light summer (when compared to how we normally roll).  Sarah plans to get a lot of schoolwork done.  The girls are taking swim lessons and plan to spend as much time as possible at the pool and parks.  I’m shooting a wedding in July and a few other engagement sessions and portrait sessions as well as attending a one day photography conference in D.C.  We’re also moving 2 miles down the road at the end of July, but like I said, compared to our normal speed, this should be a pretty slow 2 months.  It’ll hopefully give us a chance to catch our breath before a crazy Fall!

At any rate, I know you’re here to see pictures of Zach, so here you go!  I’ll do my best to post more later.  Most of these are straight out of the camera with no editing so please excuse the poor white balancing!

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking.  They look way too young to have been married for nine years.  Thanks, you’re too kind!  Tomorrow, May 26, will mark nine years of marriage for Sarah and I so I wanted to take a minute and publicly declare my love for my wife.  I mean, after all, isn’t blogging about one’s wife the most sincere way to express one’s love these days besides writing a love note on her facebook wall and changing one’s facebook profile picture to a wedding picture (note: I did those things as well)?

These past nine years have given us some wild experiences including the birth of our two daughters and our first son is due in a few short weeks.  We have survived two cross-country moves and we’ve experienced life in 5 vastly different cities.  I have changed jobs several times and we’ve both started our own businesses as we chase our dreams.  We’ve worked incredibly hard and we’ve stayed up late for more nights than I can count.  We’ve experienced unbelievable joys and we’ve experienced extreme lows like my mother passing away nearly 4 years ago.  Sarah has stood by me with every difficult decision we’ve faced and our faith has been stretched beyond anything I could have ever imagined.  We’ve been together since our freshman year of college 12+ years ago and it’s crazy to think that one day we will have been together longer than we have been apart!  We have celebrated countless holidays and birthdays together and we have been blessed to be a part of many friends’ and family members’ special moments.  We’ve certainly never been rich, but God has always given us everything we’ve ever needed and we are blessed beyond measure.

I couldn’t imagine spending my life with anyone else – no one else could understand me like she does and I could  never share a common life vision with anyone like I do with Sarah.  She is no doubt life’s best gift for me and I am forever grateful that I get to experience the next 75 years with her!  Our marriage certainly isn’t perfect, and I don’t mean to sound like I’m bragging.  I’m mostly just sharing, in awe, that God has given me someone so uniquely fit to my needs.  He needs to receive all the credit and it’s by His grace that we’ll make it the rest of this race!

So thanks for reading my open heart – it has to make an appearance every so often to keep me honest and true!  Now onto some nine-year-old pictures of a few young kids fresh out of college who didn’t have a clue what life would be throwing their way!  We’ll always be grateful to our family friend, Russ, who jumped in to photograph our wedding as a gift since we were broke and couldn’t afford to pay a photographer!  He’s a big reason why we are centering our business around helping others and giving back when we can.

Despite the lack of alcohol at our wedding, there was a whole lot of dancing!

I need to explain the next two pictures.  The above photo is the last one where we were all dreamy and clean.  I tried to explain to Sarah what kind of a family she was marrying into, but I don’t know that she believed it until this moment.  It seems as though Sam’s Club must have had a huge sale on baking flour and silly string.  My brother and cousins dumped 80lbs. of flour on our car in addition to painting the tires orange and several other “decorations.”  It seems as though I must have done something to my brother when he got married two years earlier, but I don’t really remember why needed to seek revenge… At any rate, the car wash made a lot of money off of this wedding and we were baking biscuits in the engine for many months to come.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to update the blog with how the Davis family is doing.  We’re getting ready to enter into a wild ride for the next few months, so this might be the last update for a while!  Here goes – a top 4 list of what we’ve been up to.

1) Getting ready for baby #3!  Our boy is due in the middle of June, but we’re entering the phase where anything can happen!  We’ve got two weddings booked in early June, so thankfully our friend Maggie who has worked with me before is coming along just in case this little guy decides to come on a wedding day!  You have to be prepared for anything.  Oh, and we’ve decided to name him Zachary Christopher (and call him Zach).

2)  Losing teeth…well, that’s just Kyla, but it has been a family affair!  Lucky Dad has had the pleasure of pulling two loose teeth out of her mouth in the last 2 weeks.  This from the guy who doesn’t handle blood or pain very well and has nearly passed out while visiting people in the hospital.  What can I say?  I’m a survivor!  Venturing into the world of the Tooth Fairy with the girls has been a blast although I should have done the calculations before she left a dollar the first night!  A quarter might have been a better idea.

3)  Wrapping up a school year.  We can hardly believe that summer is upon us!  That means we’re nearing our one-year anniversary of leaving Charlotte…time has flown!  The last day of teaching for me is June 11!  I’m hoping the baby will decide to come after June 13th…that would be perfect timing!  This one has a lot of exclamation marks!

4)  Enjoying Spring!  Let me just say that we love living in Charlottesville.  Yes, the winter was rough, but now that we’re in the clear and we can enjoy the Farmer’s Market and hitting all the parks with the kids, everything is grand!  One of the best parts is that Avery has been free of the severe eczema that plagued us so badly in North Carolina.  She feels a million times better and has survived Fall and Spring here with no issues at all.  Kyla and Avery also love picking flowers and Kyla can tell you the name of pretty much any flower she sees!  I learn the name of a new flower every time we go out!

And since every post needs a picture, here are a few of the girls recently.  Hopefully we’ll have some of the Zach soon!

This is what happens when you let your kids pick out their own sunglasses:

I’ve been trying to toughen them up a bit in preparation for having a younger brother.  They really enjoy the good old-fashioned WWF wrestling moves and Avery does a pretty good impression of Hulk Hogan.  Here they are trying to look their toughest.

Since our kids spend most of the day climbing on anything that is stationary, it’s pretty natural that they would love gymnastics!

Jenny contacted me last fall about photographing their July wedding.  She and Travis live in Northern Virginia, but love the Charlottesville area and are excited to get married here!  They are getting married at the UVA Chapel and will be having their reception at Siips on the Downtown Mall!  One of the best parts about their wedding is that they’re getting married on the anniversary of their first date when they lived in Arizona.

After meeting Jenny and Travis this morning face to face for the first time, I cannot wait for their wedding.  They had me cracking up the entire time and were so much fun to be with.  I think you can tell from the pictures below how relaxed they are with one another and how much they enjoy being together.  Jenny and Travis, thanks for spending the morning with me!  I’m really looking forward to your wedding this summer!

We started our time together as I usually do by giving them a little space to relax and get into things.

We then went on the move looking for cool locations with the best light.

After a quick wardrobe change, I got my private investigator skills on and spied from the trees…

From an outsider’s perspective, it might appear as though the Davis family enjoys moving.  That’s not quite the case, but we are pretty great at the act of moving.  We’ve been married for nearly 9 years and at the end of July we will have moved for the 10th time.  Yikes!  Now, before you start thinking that we’re irresponsible drifters and start thinking nasty thoughts, hear me out!  Some of those moves were early in our marriage when we were in transition before moving to Los Angeles, and two of those moves have been disaster situations (with unforeseen circumstances) where we had to get out quickly.  And in fact, two of those places we lived were home for 2 years.  We might still be living in the house we own in Charlotte were it not for many health and allergy issues with our youngest daughter.  But two of those moves were cross-country and another was to the next state.  Wow, I can hardly believe it’s been that many times.

At any rate, we moved into our house in Charlottesville in August of last year.  We found a nice 2 bedroom house in the downtown area with a garage, fenced-in yard and everything.  We jumped on it and we’ve truly enjoyed living here!  But soon after moving in, God blessed us with an addition to our family and we knew that we had already outgrown our quaint house.  Then the management company notified us of what our new rent would be for the next year and we knew we were going to be packing again!

At least this time, we only had to find a place here in town and would likely not be moving more than 5 miles away!  The search was on.  Again, we’re pretty professional at the housing hunt and we made use of all our resources.  We recently found a super-nice 3 bedroom house on a circle with a fenced-in backyard that looked like it might work.  We checked it out (probably about the 5th or 6th house we’d seen – several of which were disasters, which is a story for another post) yesterday and fell in love!  We found out today that we got the house and will be signing – get this – a TWO YEAR LEASE – this weekend!  Lookout world, the Davis family might be sticking in one spot for a while!  The house is great.  We can still walk to the downtown mall for our Saturday ritual of farmer’s market, coffee, and park.  We will only be two miles from our good friends that live down the street from us now.  And I will be LESS than one mile from work.  In fact, it would take longer for me to drive to work than it would to ride my bike because on my bike, I can cut through a large park that backs up to my school!  Are you catching a glimpse of why we’re pumped?

Now comes the lesson in real estate photography.  Below are a few pictures from the realtor’s website.  They are nicely lit and very enticing –  a striking contrast to most images of rentals we had seen.  But as I was studying them before we viewed the house, they seemed a bit odd.  I could easily tell that they’d been shot with a super-wide angle lens which was smart because it makes the rooms look nice and wide open.  But there was more to it than that.  They seemed very stretched out.  Not only did they try to deceive with a wide angle, they stretched the photos out in post-processing to make the rooms even larger.  Looking at these images after viewing the house make me laugh because I tell how stretched they really are.  Perhaps it was done on accident, but maybe not.  Either way, I don’t care.  We love this house and couldn’t be more happy right now.  We don’t move until the end of July, but it sure is nice to have something huge like this checked off the to-do-before-the-baby-comes list!

Here are a few shots of the house!  Unfortunately, the outside shot of the house is super-tiny!  I’ll have to swing by soon and get a better one.

Our oldest daughter went to bed early tonight and Sarah left to teach her class.  It was just the princess and me left alone for a game of Guess Who.  And yes, she beat me.  Don’t let the 6+ age suggestion on the box fool you.  Some kids are just born with an innate ability to play Guess Who.  Avery is one of those kids.