Sometimes Daddys go unnoticed. There’s no doubt that Brittain loves her Daddy, but because he’s gone most of the day working a full-time job and providing for us, I’m the one who has the honor of being with Brittain most of the time (and who sometimes receives more affection from her). Because of this, if she’s given the choice, she prefers me. I was excited this Father’s Day to really honor Dan like he should be honored. This day was sort of overlooked last year because of all the wedding festivities (Cecilia and Matthew’s wedding), so it was important to me for him to know that his hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.

Dan’s birthday fell on Father’s Day, so we celebrated both at his parents’ house.

This is Brittain’s sand and water table that she plays with over at Gramy and Papa’s:

Thanks, Dan for being a wonderful provider and for allowing me the best job in the world!

I’m laughing before I even write this post. Here again, I planned another “photo op.” This one wasn’t as simple as the first one, even though it involved far fewer people. It seemed that the other one just kind of fell into place. This one, however, took much more planning and stress to pull off. For one thing, we had absolutely no excuse to get “dressed.” In the previous “photo op”, we were going out to eat anyway. We were eating-in this particular evening, so getting dressed was only for the purpose of picture taking. I recall Aunt Susan yelling up to Mama telling her that she better hurry or we were going to miss sunset, and therefore miss all the good photo opportunities. At the moment she was yelling this, I was running out the door with my camera and tripod in hand so that I could go ahead and “set up” before they got down there.

When Mama, Aunt Susan and Brittain arrived at the beach, the plan was to take some natural, action shots and perhaps a few posed ones with the tri-pod. The end result of the pictures cracked me up. I’m sure you will think that there are a TON of pictures here, but could you have guessed that there were actually 288 pictures taken this particular evening? I narrowed it down to 20 to include on the blog. Why, you ask? Well, there were some where Brittain was just NOT into being photographed. Understandable. Then there were some were the wind was clearly blowing in the wrong direction because our hair was TOTALLY messed up. Understandable again. But, the main reason I couldn’t include more than 20 pictures is because of this:

Now…you might be wondering what the heck I’m talking about. If you are, that’s good, because I do think this is a good picture. But, if you look closely and focus on my mother’s mouth, you will see that I caught a photo where she is talking. Yes, it happens. When you’re attempting to take photojournalistic types of pictures, you’re bound to catch a few where someone is in mid-sentence. But I don’t believe it ever happens as much as it did that evening. It happened so much that it’s quite hilarious. I mean, come on, I said to act “natural.” Why couldn’t she just act “fake natural” and just stand there and totally pose and smile like the rest of us? We make things difficult. That’s what we do.

Anyway, here are the 20:

Believe it or not, this was NOT posed. Aunt Susan somehow captured this. There was a brief moment where Brittain was calmly sitting in my lap and I was excited with the thought that it could be a great picture of the two of us. But, before Aunt Susan could snap the picture, mom ran up behind us (in attempt to be funny) to do a sort of “rabbit ears” thing…except that it was SO not funny. So, the opportunity was immediately gone because Brittain jumped up to run off. In this picture you see Mama trying to be funny, me getting mad at her for messing up the picture, and Brittain running off for something more exciting.:

I LOVE these next 3 pictures. Brittain wasn’t into the picture taking, but she would laugh every time I would run back and forth from the camera to set the timer. So, I finally started running with her in my arms and she absolutely loved it! (Aunt Susan caught these):

On Monday, everyone left to go back home except for me, Brittain and Mama. Then, Aunt Susan arrived to spend the rest of the week. We hated to see everyone leave (in fact, I cried for most of that day), but we were thrilled to see Aunt Su Su.

One of the decisions that was made prior to the trip was that the three of us would take turns with Brittain. For me, the thing I was most looking forward to was being able to sleep late. So, it was decided that we would all split “taking care of Brittain” time. We would get equal beach time and equal sleep time. In the end, I came out on the better end of this deal. Aunt Susan is a morning person, so even if someone else had “morning duty” with Brittain, Aunt Susan would also wake up and convince the “on duty” person to go back to bed. This might not sound like a big deal to most of you, but you should know that Brittain woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the nose every day. I only tried to argue with Aunt Susan about this one day. The rest of the time I gratefully accepted the opportunity to go back to sleep. In addition to this, my mom took over as the “main mother” of the condo. She did all the laundry (sometimes washing towels before you even had the chance to use them) and even kept up with keeping Brittain’s sippy cups clean (which is not an easy task). The week was just what I needed to have a break and come back home feeling rejuvenated.

When Aunt Susan wasn’t busy carrying buckets of water back and forth to Brittain whenever Brittain would say, “I need more water,” she was swimming in the ocean. One day after we got home, I asked Brittain if she had a good time at the beach and she started talking about all the water, and swimming in the water (which she didn’t do), and so on and so on. She then paused as if to remember that no, it wasn’t her that did the swimming, it was Aunt Susan. So, she corrected herself by looking up at me and saying, “Oh. Aunt Su Su went swimming in big water.”

As you can see, there is some deep concentration going on here: