Today is Sweet Shot Tuesday! I am particularly excited about this week because I have been WAITING AND WAITING to use this picture for weeks, but I kept forgetting. I know I know it's not from *this* week, but it's so cool it needs to be shared. This week over at My3Boybarians one lucky person will win a 25 dollar gift certificate to this awesome shop called *Shey*[B]. Shey makes beautiful camera strap covers and I've secretly been wanting one for well over a year. The winner will be drawn randomly so here's hoping. And on to my picture :)

My parents live in a travel trailer. It's a huge one, with pop outs and such. However apparently the lot they were living on wasn't zoned for a camper, and the county forced them to move. They gave them a two week notice. Yeah. Their move date was May 13th. Daddy is a truck driver and wasn't home at the time, so myself and my 3 best friends and SIL were helping mom, who is disabled, pack things up and get everything together. One of my jobs was to clean off the top of the pop outs before we pulled them in. When I got to the last one, there was a pile of what appeared to be pine straw. Now, apparently I'm a moron, because it was under the awning and there is no way possible pine needles fell there, but I wasn't thinking. I just took the broom, swept it all down, and pulled in the pop out.

Then we (my two friends and I) started working on dismantling the awning. It was a pain! We ended up having to cut it off because it broke. About three hours after I had pulled the pop up in, I was cleaning up stuff in the yard and I heard a noise. These incessant little peeps. It sounded like a baby bird. And then it hit me. It was a nest. I went over and with a stick I gently moved the pine straw around. Inside were four BRAND NEW still without all their feathers baby birds. Like, a few of them still had egg shell on them. They were that new. And there was no mama in sight.

Stace and I called Mom over, and we brain stormed for a solution. We took an old basket and the kids' ginormous beach shovels and got to work. We took what we could of the original nest, babies included, and put them in a basket. I them carried the basket to the roof of the camper in hopes that the mama would find them. Then it was time to go home.

The next morning when we came back I crawled up there, and they were peeping. I was so glad they were still alive, but I was unsure of whether or not their mom had come back. I was terrified we handled them too much, or something. But much to my surprise, there she was, hopping through the trees, impatiently waiting for me to move. Since we knew the mom was watching, we took the basket down and transferred the babies, who had grown feathers overnight, to a basket with a handle, and hung the basket on a tree branch.

And then we waited. And we waited. We tried to catch the mom coming back. We just wanted to make sure she wasn't going to reject them. And then all of a sudden there was not one bird coming back with food for the babies, but TWO! The daddy came back too!

So, being the photographer that I am, I neglected my daughterly duties of trying to get last minute stuff done, and I climbed up on the roof of the camper. And I sat there. And I sat there. For an hour, I sat there. I was NOT comfortable, but I would not give up. First I'll show you the babies, then I'll show you my sweet shot. The shot of a lifetime!