It's Not Easy Being One

The weekend after Lina turned one, she bonked her head on the coffee table. It was actually quite comical if you ignore the fact that there was pain involved. She bent down to pick up a toy and hit her head on the table, cried for a second and tried again with the exact same outcome. She did this three times in a row. After the third time I decided it was most definitely nap time. Two hours later, she woke up with a black eye. It wasn’t a bad one, it just looked like she was really tired. Fortunately it was the day after we celebrated her birthday with her Grandparents and Great Grandparents.

The very next weekend, we were planning on heading over to the park to snap some pictures for the invitations for her big party in the park. I wanted the sun to be a little lower in the sky for better lighting, so I planned on going after her afternoon nap. Guess who woke up from her nap with a fresh shiner. Bright and purple. I don’t know how that one happened, I can only guess that she banged her head on the crib while trying to resist taking a nap.

Since I was the one taking the pictures I decided to postpone the shoot until the next day when her eye would be a little less puffy. I thought we should do something a little more whimsy since I would be shooting her profile mostly. As much as I didn’t mind her having pictures with a black eye, I didn’t exactly want to send out twenty something black eye invitations. Dressed in her purple tutu dress with her matching purple eye, we headed to the park and found a nice, shaded, slightly overgrown grassy patch. We were on our way to meet up with some family members so we had to keep the shoot short. I may not have gotten the perfect shot that I was looking for in that short amount of time, but I was able to get a few good ones that would work for our needs.

Later when I was playing with the images in Photoshop and looking for the perfect invitation that I could get quickly and cheaply I was pleased with how everything came together. The purple dress that she got from her Ginga (Mason’s mom) and the purple carnation that she got from Great Grandma Ev (my grandma) ended up going perfectly with the Tinker Bell invite from Wal-mart, thus changing our theme from Rubber Ducks to Fairies. I was so nervous when I decided to use Wal-mart, being a photo snob, I questioned their quality. But I couldn’t find a better price or a better turn-around time. I could have both my invites and my thank you cards in an hour. When I went to pick them up, I was shocked at how much I loved them. The colors were spot on and there wasn’t a pixel in sight. I love when my low expectations are proven oh-so-wrong.

This wasn't one of the pictures we used, but it does show off her eye quite nicely.