HAPPY EASTER!!!

I’m excited to announce that we will be participating in this year’s Baby & Child Portrait Contest, hosted by our fabulous lab, Millers Professional Imaging!  As with our mini-session sale I announced yesterday, all print proceeds from these sessions will be donated to our March for Babies team (click here if you haven’t heard about this yet)!

Let us help document your child’s ever-changing stages with priceless portraits that will be with you for a lifetime! Schedule an appointment with us from now until May 31st , and your child’s portrait will also be entered into the contest. A range of prizes will be awarded from $500 – $5,000 in cash, which goes to the family of the winning portraits!

Portrait sessions are limited so please call or email today to reserve your child’s appointment.

Contest Rules

• Children, infant to age twelve, are eligible.
• Images must be taken between January 1st and June 21st, 2010.
• Only one image per session can be entered into the contest.

Don’t forget about the $59 mini-session sale!  Book your slot today at www.swadleystudio.com/book!

Alright, now that you completed the prerequisite reading material (I trust you did…), you get a reward!  YAY for rewards!!!

We have blocked off two days in our schedule to raise money for March for Babies.   On March 27th & April 3rd, we will be holding an entire day of mini-sessions at a beautiful outdoor location 10-15 minutes from Winchester, VA.  What are these mini-sessions, you ask?

• 30 minutes of photography
• Any kind of session (family, high school senior, baby, child, maternity, headshot, engagement, pet, you name it!)
• All images will be online for 2 weeks for viewing & ordering
• One complimentary 5×7 of your choice with your print order
• PLUS! You get a disk of your images for Facebook use (with our logo) to show off to all your friends!
• PLUS!  For baby & child sessions, we’ll enter your favorite image into our upcoming baby & child portrait contest (I’ll be announcing this tomorrow!)

And don’t forget… all print proceeds from these sessions will go to Team Remembering Logan & Cannon

Tell all your friends, and make a fun outdoor day for everyone!  In case of rain, the makeup day will be April 11.  If you can’t make the makeup day, we will credit your session fee towards a regular session on another day of your choice (you’ll still receive all the perks of the mini-session that do not come with our regular sessions).

What are you waiting for?  Go book your session! www.swadleystudio.com/book

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It’s March for Babies time again, and we are looking forward to another successful year of helping to bring healthy babies into the world in Logan’s memory. Team Remembering Logan raised over $7,000 last year and was the #1 family team in Winchester, and the #2 family team in the state of Virginia - second by only $10. We can’t even explain what an amazing feeling it was to help keep other families from knowing this type of pain, and we could never have done it without all of our wonderful teammates and donors. This year we need your support again. If you want to walk and fundraise with us we would love to have you on the team. But if not, a donation would be greatly appreciated. We know there has been a lot of need in the world this year, especially with the recent earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. But as we learned last year, it doesn’t take a large donation to make a difference. Every $10 gets us closer to being the #1 team in Virginia and saving another baby.

As Adam and I always say, the past two years have been both the worst and the best years of our lives. We lost our beautiful baby boy, and brought our beautiful baby girl into the world about one year and one week later. We think of Logan every single day, and especially on those “anniversaries”. It’s fitting that this walk takes place in May - In May of 2008 Adam and I found out that we were expecting our first baby. We had so many fears, expectations and dreams for Logan from the first day we found about about him. By the time we got to about 20 weeks most of the fear was gone and we were just anxious to have him here. We were so excited and couldn’t wait to meet him. We spent our evenings and weekends working on the nursery and we were getting ready for my first baby shower with my side of the family. That was supposed to take place in Lancaster on Thanksgiving weekend 2008. As most of you know, that shower never happened. Instead we spent most of the week of Thanksgiving in the hospital, and on Thanksgiving Day we had to say hello and goodbye to Logan in what could never have been enough time. I would never go back and erase those 7 months of being pregnant with Logan, and holding him in my arms for the short time that we had with him.  I never had the chance to look Logan in the eyes and tell him how much I love him, I never got to hear him cry and try to figure out how to make him smile, but he will always be our first baby, the one who showed us that the statement, “You don’t know what love is until you hold your baby in your arms” is so true.

Since that day our lives have changed more than I could have ever imagined. Having Kyla has done so much to help us heal and has brought so much joy back into our hearts. She is the most amazing gift and every day that we have with her is such a blessing. Sometimes when she’s asleep on my chest I look at her and see Logan’s face in hers and wonder what he would look like now. When she throws a temper tantrum or giggles at us we wonder what Logan’s personality would have been like. These are things we will never know, but we find some peace in knowing that Kyla will always have the most amazing guardian angel in her big brother.

This year we have decided to name our team Remembering Logan and Cannon, in memory of Logan and the son of two very special friends. Mandy and Daniel came into our lives shortly after losing Logan, thanks to one of our favorite Labor & Delivery nurses. They had lost their first baby Cannon to stillbirth, in November of 2007 when Mandy was 9 months pregnant. They were pregnant with their second son, Cade (who turned 1 in February!) when we met them. Getting to know Mandy and Daniel, hearing their story and seeing them go through their second pregnancy was exactly what Adam and I needed. They probably don’t even realize how much they have helped us in the grieving process, but it just doesn’t seem right to do this walk in Logan’s name and not include Cannon. We hate to have met such a wonderful couple this way, but we are so happy to call them friends.

Before Logan and Kyla, we never truly understood what a miracle it is to bring a healthy baby into the world. Although the March of Dimes doesn’t focus specifically on stillbirth, any research that leads to healthier pregnancies and a decrease in prematurity and infant mortality can only help get us closer to preventing this type of tragedy.

If you would like to help Jon & I reach our goal towards helping Erica’s team, just click the box below and you will go right to our donation page! Also, don’t forget to check back tomorrow to learn about the awesome SALE that we are having to help us reach our goal!

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Here is the official press release:

Washington, DC – January 20, 2010 - WeddingWire, the nation’s leading wedding technology company, just announced Swadley Studio has been selected to receive the WeddingWire 2010 Bride’s Choice Awards™ for photography!

The annual Bride’s Choice Awards recognizes and celebrates excellence in quality and service within the wedding industry, as determined by recent reviews and extensive surveys from over 500,000 newlyweds.

Swadley Studio is among the top five percent of all vendors in the WeddingWire community, which includes over 100,000 wedding professionals across the US and Canada. Awards were given to winners across 19 different service categories, from wedding venues to wedding photographers.

“We are excited to recognize and honor the success of the top wedding professionals within the WeddingWire Community” said Timothy Chi, WeddingWire’s Chief Executive Officer. “The annual Bride’s Choice Awards program has given us the unique opportunity to highlight the best wedding professionals in each region as reviewed by brides and grooms who have utilized their services in the past year.”

We are happy to announce that Swadley Studio is among the very best professional photographers within the WeddingWire Network, which includes WeddingWire and Martha Stewart Weddings.