A couple of weeks ago, the husband and I decided to do a cake smash photo shoot for Hudson’s first birthday! It was pretty obvious what theme we needed to go with (when your daddy is a pilot, you get all things planes/helicopters). My good friend said she would make the cake for it, and it was honestly so perfect! She did such a wonderful job (I was going to help, but really, someone needed to watch her little one ;))! The cute airplane on top came from Michael’s. It was in a kit so we painted it blue and the husband glued it all together for me.

To set up the background, I went to Target and found some black tablecloths in the party section. We stretched one across the entry way from our dining room into our kitchen (that just happens to have the most dreamy natural light pouring in) and laid one on the ground. As you can see, the one on the ground didn’t make it through the whole photo shoot because Hudson kept tripping on it.

For the props, I bought some banner boards from Hobby Lobby, cut and hot glued the cloud background on it, and added the red letters. I then found some pretty red and white string to put it all together. The husband helped me make balloon clouds and also made the awesome paper airplanes! He was really nice and hung all of it up for me too (he’s much taller than me so it was an easy task for him)! The cute aviator hat seen in some of the pictures was made by mother-in-law when Hudson was first born and it finally fits him!

After setting everything up and taking a few practice shots (as well as some of the cake before it was “smashed”), we put Hudson down and let him have at it! He wasn’t much interested in the cake and instead made a beeline towards the planes (not surprised). Once he noticed the cake, he was interested, but he didn’t want to touch it! The only cake smashing that went on was when he fell on it, which was pretty entertaining. We ended up feeding some of it to him and he loved it! I thought he would start grabbing at it, but he wasn’t about that at all. Even though we didn’t get a proper “smash” out of him, I was kind of relieved! He didn’t get a sugar high and I didn’t have to clean up a huge mess, but we got some cute pictures! I’d call it a success!