It's my party and I'll cry if I want to!

When Mat and Hayley booked their Smash 'n' Splash for Zahra's 1st Birthday, the only date that was available to them was the day after they arrived back from their holiday abroad. To be exact, about 12 hours after! So we discussed the possibility that Zahra may be tired and what we could do if she wasn't in the best of moods! Let's face it, none of us are particularly overjoyed after hours of travelling once the holiday is over!

Everything started out perfectly. From the second this gorgeous, bronzed family walked through the door, Zahra was all smiles! So Hayley changed her into the beautiful Monsoon dress which fitted her perfectly and we began with her portrait session. I love the portrait part of the shoot, a chance to dress your little one in their best outfit and capture some beautiful birthday memories before things start to get messy!

And capture some memories we did! Zahra was the most professional little model, really working the camera and just generally having a really lovely time. Until that is, she stopped having a lovely time! Five minutes was enough for this little lady, she'd done her job and wanted out! With no warning, she simply rested her face on the floor and let out an almighty sob. Bless her, impressed she was not!

So we swiftly moved on to the smashing of the cake. Mat and Hayley picked out a gorgeous peach tutu from my collection of outfits made complete with a beautiful vintage headband and Zahra looked simply stunning. But the cake also failed to impress. She was just tired, plain and simple and there are some days that even a lovely big birthday cake are not going to fix! This was one of those days!

It's not altogether unusual for a baby to cry when we begin the cake smashing, in fact it's quite common really! But they will usually quite enjoy the splash part of the session, most babies love a good splashy bath! So if we fail to get a good selection of images from one part of the shoot, we can usually make up for it elsewhere. However all of my sessions are baby led and you can't make a baby have a good time if they really aren't in the mood. So we tried Zahra in the lovely, warm bubble bath, complete with rubber duckies but even that failed to cheer her up. She was done! We managed a couple of nice shots, caught in between the tears but sadly not quite enough to complete a full gallery.

So, at the end of the shoot I told Mat and Hayley to leave it with me as it's really difficult to gauge how many useable images there are until the editing process has begun. But if there weren't quite enough images to make a full gallery, I told them that they were quite welcome to come back and we could try again. The only further expense at this point would be for the cake.

There were actually some beautiful images of Zahra, and as Hayley said upon receiving the gallery, they really do tell a story. But because there wasn't a lot of variety of bath shots, we decided to re-schedule another Splash session, this time without the cake.

So! Last week Mat and Zahra made a return trip to my studio and apart from a few painful teething issues we managed to get enough shots to complete the gallery and here is the end result......