Project Cake Smash is complete! And I must say, was a complete success! It was an amazing day.
As you know from my last post, poor little Growly Bear had been feeling a little under the weather. But, woke up the morning of the shoot happy and seemed to be feeling good. So, after her morning nap, and a little lunch, we headed over to my friends house.
She had it set up like a Diva's dream! Everywhere you looked it was fuchsia pink with black accents, and zebra print, and balloons! Very rock star! I felt a little guilty knowing that the end result would be cake smeared everywhere!
We decided to start off with the pink and black tutu halter dress I made a couple weeks ago (click here to view that post if you missed it). At first Growly Bear seemed OK with it, and had fun talking to the baby in the mirror.
She woke up refreshed and raring to go, so back we went!
My girlfriend and I both thought that after her nap, she'd drive into the cake, and there would be no turning back! She even said how she would have to work fast to make sure she captured the moment as it was happening because it would be over before we knew it. At one point, we'd even talked about making two cakes so we could get extra shots. Turns out all that worry was for nothing....
You can imagine our surprise when we were still sitting on the floor of her studio half an hour later trying to coax Growly Bear into smashing the cake!
We tried everything! We gave her a little purple microphone thinking she couldn't bash the cake with it. Nope! My friend found her a giant pink plastic spoon in hopes that she would attack the cake with that. Nope! I pretended to eat that cake being very vocal about how delicious it was, and that she should try it too. Nope! She took a couple licks of icing, and stuck her toe in it, and that was about it. She had no idea what she was suppose to do!
So, me being the "stage mom" that I am, got in there and showed her how it was done. She thought it was kinda funny, but still didn't have and desire to rip it apart herself.
She was happy to mash the chunks that I handed her, but didn't want to get in there and do the dirty work herself. I was more covered in icing then her by this point, and she just giggled at me as she daintily poked the cake with her fork. My girlfriend and I sat there in shock wondering if others have to "help" their babies smash the cake when they do this kinda shoot. This was my friend's first Cake Smash shoot, and even though neither of us really knew what to expect, this certainly wasn't it!
After what seemed like all eternity, she picked up a rather large chunk and took a bite. Believe it or not, this was the only time she actually bit the cake! She had lots of finger fulls of icing, but only ever BIT the cake once. Funny girl.... Luckily the shot was captured though, and it's one of my faves from the day.
She did end up having lots of fun crawling back and forth through the chunks. And as a result, spread the sweet, sticky mess E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E!
After over an hour of playing in the cake, Growly Bear informed us she was more then done, and proceeded to have a bit of a melt down.
A fun fact that I've never mentioned before, is that Growly Bear HATES other peoples bath tubs. In fact, one night when my hubby and I went out to dinner with friends a few weeks ago, we left her with my mom and dad for the evening. My mom had the audacity to try to give her a nice warm little bath after dinner, which resulted in her having the mother of all melt downs, and my poor mom had to call us at the restaurant and ask us to come home, becasue no matter what they tried, they could NOT get her to calm down. I was hoping it was just a one time occurrence, but it turned out that wasn't the case... Other peoples tubs scare the crap outta her too!
My poor girlfriend took my sticky little wiggling kid upstairs so she could run her a nice bath, and Growly Bear lost it! Nothing either of us did would calm her down! I attempted to wash her in the sink instead, which didn't go well at all. The wall and floor were quickly covered in sticky pink water and rainbow sprinkle cake chunks, and Growly Bear just screamed her little face off! So, I wiped her down best I could, and we sprinkled a little baby powder on her to try to soak up some of the grease from the icing (which was made with lard, butter and icing sugar! Yeah, you can imagine how that felt on her skin!) and we wrestled her into some fresh jammies. She seemed pretty pleased with herself by that point, so maybe that was her way of getting back at us for playing "dress up" with her all afternoon.
All in all though, it was a great day, and despite the final melt down, I really do think Growly Bear had a blast. And we've got 100 amazing photos to look back at and enjoy for the rest of our lives. So, I going to go ahead and mark this one down as an extremely successful day.
Don't forget to check out the new fan page to view the entire shoot!
Love and Hugs