On Monday I turned 30! Whoo! I’ve always been one to get excited about my birthday. Growing up as a shy girl who didn’t like to make waves, my birthday felt like the one day where I could make my voice heard unapologetically. By the time I was 16 I had coined a new phrase still used in my family, “It’s my birthday, I do what I want.” And this year what I wanted was to have new family photos. Now being a photographer you wouldn’t think this to be such a feat but getting myself in the photos and getting my husband to play ball too is the real challenge.
Now, anyone who has had a conversation with me for more than 10 minutes knows a few things:
- I am a mom and my kids are the light of my life.
- I have a lot of kids.
- They are a little crazy.
Recently we discovered a movie, The Greatest Showman. If you haven’t seen it, buy it. Don’t rent it because you will want to watch it enough to get your money out of buying it. Just trust me. My kids LOVE the music and the movie is visually stunning. So much of the lyrics speak straight to my soul but there is one in particular that is so fitting of my life. In one song Hugh Jackman’s character is trying to convince another to try the circus life and says, “If it’s crazy, live a little crazy.” He’s not apologizing for it or glossing it over. Sure it’s crazy, but there’s not a thing wrong with that.
I have 5 wild kids. Two businesses. Big families. My life may be crazy but it is mine.
As I said, I love my birthday. And you know one thing I love MOST about my birthday? Cake. Cake is amazing. Cake may be one of the reasons I love being a wedding photographer so much. Obviously I love my job for lots of reasons but I would be lying if I said proximity to cake wasn’t one of them. So when I started thinking about my 30th birthday photos I decided to roll with that. I wanted to do what I have photographed so many babies doing, eating cake, with my hands, in front of a camera. Crazy? Maybe. But I live a little crazy.
And if I was going to do this I was going to do it right. So I called up some of my favorite vendors knowing that they could help me make the best of these photos. Some sparkling grape juice from my favorite local winery (and distillery) Wollersheim Winery in Sauk Prairie. Adorable and delicious chocolates from the Chocolate Caper in Oregon (and now Sun Prairie). A custom cake fork (yes, that’s a thing and it is awesome) from a wonderful local artist who makes the coolest stamped metal pieces, Kelly at Eve of Joy. And of course the cake could only come from my favoritiest of local bakers, famous for their unbelievable buttercream and whose cakes I can identify at weddings the second I walk in the room by the heavenly smell. If you love cake and haven’t had a cake from Carl’s Cakes at Market Street Diner in Sun Prairie, you are seriously missing out. Big shout out and thank you to all of these amazing local vendors, when you are done checking out the photos, come back to the links because these guys are great.
And the biggest of thank yous to my lovely sister in law for helping me with these photos. Hard for me to take photos of myself. Everything else I could handle but no matter how good a photographer I am I can’t be two places at once. So if I am in the picture, she covered the camera work and I am SOOOOO thankful to have her. (Side note, she is a wonderful photographer in her own right and a queen with newborns, check out her work too, Livia Marie Photography.)
So without further ado, here’s me, a cake, and the rest of my circus. <3
