Sep 15, 20213 min read

Westlee's 1st Birthday and Cake Smash at Hillcrest High School

A Sports Themed First Birthday at the Football Field

When you come from a sports family, you can bet that your first birthday photoshoot will be sports themed. Westlee is turning ONE this month. His mom is a basketball coach and his dad is a football coach. And not just any football coach. The head coach at Hillcrest High School! This gave us the opportunity to head out to the field to capture photos that we might not otherwise have gotten. I also want to take the time to give Meagan, Westlee's mom, some serious props! You did an AMAZING job on the details. To Westlee's custom shirt, the sports ball, the cake, his bow tie, and his suspenders!!! I was kind of in love with how incredible the set up looked. Even better than the inspiration pictures. 😁

Meagan and Lee, you didn't know this at the time, but this photoshoot was bringing back some memories for me! I've worked with pre-schoolers for the past couple years and I've met many kiddos that have had a significant impact on my life. While I can't name names....I had one friend that I feel Westlee could be best friends with some day. Seriously! This preschooler's favorite sport was basketball and he LIVED for it 😁 As Westlee gets older I'm curious what sport he will gravitate too 😉 Only time will tell. In the meantime, I am not going to forget his favorite word he said many times during the session, "ball."

This shoot also deserves a shoutout to Westlee's older siblings! Trenten, Jordan, and Kaylee were so much fun and I could tell they truly loved their brother. They offered to help and were always willing to lend a hand. I was sad I didn't have more time to take pictures of you three with your brother! Westlee, you have quite the amazing team that you will be walking through life with.

The Cake Smash

In many situations we plan, some things don't go exactly as we imagine them. In this case, we had some troubles with the cake. 😂 You might notice that it's leaning slightly. Second problem: the cardboard base of the cake was square. This resulted in the cake not fitting on the cake stand. Problem Number 3: we did not have a knife, scissors, or any other way to get the cake off the cardboard and onto cake stand. Soooo....we improvised. Meagan managed to fold the card board so that it fit onto the cake stand, but as a result it started leaning a bit more. But we made it work! You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if that paper around the cardboard would have detached so we would have taken the cake off? lol Things we think of later, right?

Once presented with the cake, Westlee delicately dug in. I think this was the cleanest cake smash I've ever witnessed. He would use one pointer finger to touch the icing then lick his finger. The only reason his hands were coated by the end was because he was provided some assistance. lol While we didn't get any smiles during this event, he continued to eat the cake so I take that as a sign that he liked it! 😉 His dad did say that he'll eat anything. He even tried to eat the fondant sports decorations which we quickly had to snatch from him. In the last picture, you may notice that the cake is no longer there. We officially declared "all done" as I think Westlee may have continued to eat the icing until it was gone. 😂

As a side note, my favorite memory from this cake smash was that Westlee couldn't decide if he should continue eating icing or abandon ship and reach for a ball. ❤️ I think the icing won until the cake was taken away. At that point, he returned back to the baseballs.