It's Her Party and Oh, Will She Cry

Grammy, look away. This won't be fun for you.

Everyone else, allow me to tell you a little story.

Ever since I had Ellie's newborn photos taken, I've been looking forward to having a one-year photo session for her, too. At the time, I didn't realize that we would be back in St. Pete around Ellie's birthday, but I still was hopeful that we would be able to figure out a way to have a session with Jason Angelini, our wedding photographer who also did a NYC session for us and captured Ellie's baptism. When we did end up in Florida at the right time, I was psyched!

We scheduled Ellie's photo shoot for the week of her birthday. Unfortunately, at that time she was in the midst of a nasty cold plus teething plus general grumpiness. Hoping for nothing less than all the smiling one-year-olds I see on the Angelini blog from these types of sessions, I decided to reschedule Ellie's shoot for a couple weeks later, when she would be happier. In the meantime, I agonized over the right time of day for the session (so as to not interfere with naps), the right amount of outfit changes (to minimize her stress), the cutest backdrops, etc. This was going to be perfect.

When we arrived at the shoot the day of, everything was off to a good start. Ellie was in a good mood, having just seen a doggie nearby (that can brighten anybody's day, right?). We got some great family pictures right off the bat.

*** All photos by Jason Angelini Photography ***

Then, we did a quick change and took another photo I really wanted to capture: Ellie sitting in front of a clothesline holding all her most notable dresses from her first year, namely her Easter dress (also the very first piece of clothing we bought for her when we found out we were having a girl), her award-winning Hoboken Baby Parade dress (Best Dressed Child!), her baptism party dress, her Snow White Halloween costume, her Christmas dress and her Alice in Wonderland birthday dress. Ellie wasn't super smiley for these pictures, and she really wanted to crawl away, but they still turned out great.

Then, I got greedy and went for a spontaneous outfit change before the next set of pictures, to be taken with a bunch of balloons. She started out okay, having fun with Daddy...

And being generally adorable...

But then, it took a turn.

A drastic, tearful turn.

She was unhappy...

And that was just all there was to it.

So, we decided to head inside for the next round. She cheered up on the way back to the studio so we decided to give it a go with another backdrop. We did manage to get a decent shot...

But the rest, well...see for yourself.

Yeah, those are totally getting blown up on canvas and hung over the mantle.

We took a brief break from baby torture so I could nurse her to settle her down. Then we went into the Smash the Cake portion, in the hopes that getting to play with something edible would distract her enough from her Worst Day Ever that we could get some fun birthday shots. Well, she was intrigued at first.

But then, when she actually got her hands into it, she was on to us. And she was not amused.

She most certainly would NOT eat the foul stuff.

I tried to pick her up, carry her around, take her outside, show her some doggies...all the usual things that calm her down when she's really upset. But, nothing worked.

We did manage to get one quick sweet look, and some precious fingers-and-toes shots...

But that was it. She just wasn't having it. Hey, we should all be so lucky to live in a world where birthday cake is the worst thing to ever happen to us, am I right?

Regardless of Ellie's mood, big thanks to Jason and Lucia for these pictures. Jason can even take lovely pictures of a screaming baby! And it was so nice to have them be a continued part of our growing family.

As for Ellie and the Birthday Cake of Doom...we'll just hope she'll warm up to it a bit before next year.