Calendar Girl

Despite yesterday's post, today is actually Piper's real three month birthday (at 8:29pm exactly!). I have a ton of sappy, sentimental thoughts about reaching this milestone, which I hope to share soon...But for now, I thought I'd let you all in on a little project I've been tinkering around with- Monthly Photos! (this idea shocks no one, I'm sure. A chance to build another "photobooth" type set, take more pictures, and show off my precious little Piper? Win, win, win.)

I knew I wanted to document Piper's growth over time, and thought once-a-month photos would be doable, without stressing me out too much. (I took weekly photos of my belly throughout my pregnancy, and though I love having those pics, it was often a pain to make time to shoot that often). I had seen a few ideas online, so I cobbled together what I liked from those and then tried to make it my own. My goals:

• Shoot full length, to show how her little body is beefing up.
• Maintain a consistant backdrop to show scale and keep the focus on 'lil P.
• Include text, to label the month and record little memory "snippets".
• Incorporate a chalkboard- a feature element in her nursery, and a bit of a theme from my pregnancy.

Thankfully Piper is (usually) a cooperative model, and she was patient with me as I fooled around. I tend to be pretty picky about this stuff, so I'm not 100% thrilled with the lighting (hard to keep that consistent from month to month) and I might play around with the text/fonts before printing them all (that part is all added in a photoshop layer). But those are things that can all be fixed (or forgiven), so overall I'm happy with what we've come up with. I don't exactly look forward to Piper growing up (my baaaaaaaby!), but I am excited to document how she changes over time.

So here's our ode-in-progress to sweet Piper Jane, month by month.

(click on each photo to enlarge)

Dang, I love this kid.