Natalie Rose
Your baby is about to turn ONE – and you want the experience of a Cake Smash photo session. Perhaps you’ve got a big first birthday party coming up that you want to display photos at, or maybe you want a nice photo for your birthday invitation! Maybe you are skipping the party altogether and just want a fun messy cake experience to remember your little one’s big milestone.
Planning:
What age should I get my baby’s Cake Smash done?
It’s important to plan to book in your Cake Smash session for when baby is 10 or 11 months to allow time for processing and ordering your prints.
Theme:
What theme would you like to choose? We can do just about any theme you can think of for your session backdrop. Some Cake Smash themes we have done recently are
-Rustic barn
-First trip around the sun
-Pink butterflies
-Simple blue and beige
-Peter Rabbits garden
Some themes ideas we’d like to do are
-Harry Potter
-Sunflowers
-Bluey
-Space
-Blueberries
-Strawberries
But really, you can pick anything you like!
We spent the day before the barn session at our friends farm, making mini hay bales. Outfits and pieces from your backdrop will often be lovingly crafted by me – it is my favourite thing to throw my creativity into designing new sets that I know my sweet clients will love.
What to bring:
Please bring with you a favourite snack of baby’s like chippies or crackers. This might surprise you, but not all babies like cake! Some babies will be more happy to munch their favourite cracker than dig into the cake – so poking a few favourite snacks in the back of the cake is one of our tricks to hold baby’s interest. Also a sippy cup of water is a must – cake icing is sweet and often baby will be very glad to have a sip of water in between bites of cake! Another thing I recommend to bring is a change of clothing that you won’t mind getting sticky – you may need to pick up your baby while they are covered in cake.
During the session:
Over stimulated babies will quickly lose interest – I simply invite parents to sit near baby and we have a calm and quiet chat while I take the photos. This puts baby at ease and allows baby to explore the cake in their own time. Occasionally I might call their name or make a silly sound to get their attention but I try to keep the environment low pressure and baby-led.
What’s next:
After the ‘smashing’ part of the session we bring out our adorable miniature claw foot bathtub. We put in a small amount of warm water and let baby splash around before clean-up. Some babies even enjoy the bath more than smashing the cake!
