Family photos with Christina Heaston, take two!

You all might remember our first round of family photos that our friend Christina Heaston shot for us. I absolutely loved them, but I was just a handful of months post-baby and not yet feeling like myself. She still somehow managed to capture so many great photographs though, and we have them hanging all around our house. This session though I was feeling much more like me, and I'm even happier with them, if that's even possible! Now if only we could photoshop one of Henry's goofy grins onto all the photos! haha. But really, he was a trooper, hanging out for over three hours while we explored Sedona, AZ with Christina and her boyfriend Bobby.

If you're looking for a photographer for any occasion, I highly recommend Christina. She is extremely talented, so professional, and a great friend of ours. Thank you again Christina for capturing such a great time in my family's life- we will cherish them forever and we can't wait until next time.

Light Parade 2011

Everything is so much more fun with Henry around, and that goes double for the holidays.  Even though we still have a month until Christmas, we've been having a great time adopting new traditions, and making old ones our own. Every year our town has a light parade, and it's a lot of fun to get bundled up, get some hot chocolate, and watch all the floats go by. One of the things I love most about living in a small town is all of the tradition and fun the holidays bring, and our town really seems to come even more alive this time of the year. We had a great time at the parade, and I think Henry did too (minus the fire engines' sirens- he HATED those). It was a fun night though- cold but not too cold, crowded downtown but not too bad- and a good time was had by all!

Happy almost-December, everyone!

Henry's 1st birthday party

Ahh, what a wonderful and positively special day! Today we celebrated our sweet Henry's birthday, and it was pretty amazing to look around the room and see so many of our most favorite people, all there for Henry. It still blows me away to feel the love on days like today, and I can't thank our friends and family enough for being such beautiful parts of our life, especially Henry's. He's a lucky, lucky boy.

I had a ton of fun creating and crafting every little detail and even making Henry's bowtie. I actually made Hank a matching one too, but he wasn't into it! ha. Being that the party was at two o'clock, I decided to do more of an appetizer/light lunch spread, so I made caprese bites (cherry tomatoes, fresh basil and buffalo mozzarella drizzled with balsamic vinegar), vegan pasta salad, artichoke and spinach dip, hummus and pitas, and lots of veggies. For dessert I ordered six dozen cupcakes from a local bakery and a much larger-than-expected smash cake for Henry. The cupcakes were seriously GREAT. I tried a little of each kind, and my favorite was probably the red velvet. We also had some other flavors- chocolate sea salt caramel, carrot cake, birthday cake surprise (kind of like a fancy funfetti), and lemon supreme. Yum.

One of my favorite parts of the party was sharing a video I made of the past year. There weren't many dry eyes in the room, and it was really neat to be able to commemorate this past year in such a special way. I'll be sharing that movie here on his actual birthday (on Tuesday), so check back in a few days if you'd like to see it too! Another touch I loved was the "12 months of Henry" photos I strung on green and white baker's twine above the food area. It was neat to see them all lined up, and our guests really enjoyed it too.

Overall the party was beyond successful. Henry was in great spirits the entire time, there was enough food and drink to go around, and the "thank you" bags of cookies I made for guests to take as they left were all snatched up. All in all, it was the best day and the most wonderful way to celebrate our sweet birthday boy. 













































silhouette originally created by Mando at Immaculate Tattoo (same silhouette that is on my arm). Made into a digital file and altered by the talented Lindsay Goldner.