I honestly can’t help myself. I’m a sucker for a photoshoot.

Growing up, my Dad took pictures of us every single day. We have boxes and boxes of pictures from the first 20 years of each of our lives and I love that. I’m so grateful to have all those pictures and memories. Which is exactly why I refuse to apologize for being the annoying mom who takes a million pictures and videos. ;)

I love the idea of doing a yearly photoshoot of the kids on their birthdays, as long as they will let me. Some years will be themed, or more complicated of a set up or design, while other years will simply be just the kids and balloons. The point is that you just do it, and you’ll always be happy you have those memories later in life.

The idea for this shoot came from an instagram post I saw a year ago. I took a screenshot and saved it for this very moment! Mary Lawless Lee was who I got the inspo from. She did something similar for her daughter’s 1st birthday and I loved the idea.

We did a toned down and more simple version though. I knew Nico wouldn’t sit still for long and he’s not a smile on command kind of baby. So I knew if I put TOO much effort into this shoot and it didn’t work out, then I would have been upset. So it was best to keep it simple and just have fun with it.

Well, Nico didn’t have fun the whole time… haha

He did love to explore and look at the pictures and point to them. So we tried to give him a few props to hold to keep his attention and keep him in the right spot. It didn’t work for long but just enough time to get a couple shots.

We thought giving him a picture of his first ultra sound would be sweet to hold and see where he started and where is today. Pretty emotional for me, honestly.

The sun and lighting just was not in our favor, either days. Yes, we shot this on two different days! ;). The first day was darker than we anticipated and he was a little cranky, so we ended up only getting a few cute candids.

Thankfully, the second day, Luca was being very silly and making him laugh behind the camera. So we got a couple smiles out of him!

Some of my favorite shots have me running out of the frame after I sat him down. He would crawl away so fast unless he was being entertained! They are so real and candid, and those are definitely the memories I want to keep forever.

Details:

I printed all the photos at Walgreens.
The sizes I used are 16x20, 8x10 and then 5x7’s sprinted around the fill in some spots and do some overlapping.
I bought these black 16x20 frames for some of my favorite pictures to lean against the wall. (I’ll hang these somewhere in the house now that we are done with the shoot).
I just used blue painters tape to attach the pictures to the wall. That way I can easily remove them without hurting the image or the wall.