Valentine’s Day Photo Shoot With Cookie’s Kids

One of my favorite things to do is take fun, themed photographs of my kids. I do take photos of them nearly everyday but staging while using props and a clothing theme is so much more fun and special. Given the task of taking Valentine’s day photos of them, I chose Cookie’s Kids for my kids Valentine’s Day outfits.

Cookie’s Kids is an online super department store for children’s clothes, school uniforms, accessories, boys suits, shoes, toys and so much more all for such a great price that you will be astounded. In 1972, brothers Cookie and Marvin started selling holiday toys; now Cookie’s Kids is celebrating their 40th year of business. Cookie’s Kids have 7 stores in the NYC area in Bronx, Brooklyn and Jamaica as well as online at CookiesKids.com

The site is easy to navigate and super shopper friendly. Finding the perfect outfit, for the right price and size is so easy. I had so much fun choosing a Valentine’s day clothing theme for my  kids. After lots of decisions, I chose to go with gray, red and black and CookiesKids.com had so much good quality, great price inventory to choose from.  Here are some tips for taking themed pictures of your kids that I have discovered over time.

Tips for taking themed pictures of your kids:

• Be relaxed – I KNOW this is so much easier said than done, believe me being “relaxed” isn’t my strong suit either. But it truly does help if you are relaxed because then the kids will be too.
• Have a general feeling or theme in mind – a little bit of direction helps, but then again having no direction at all is cool too. For this Valentine’s Day shoot with Cookie’s Kids clothing my general theme was cute kids, dressed up kinda fancy but acting relaxed in the backyard (easy enough, no?).
• Grab a prop – Kids like having things to do or hold, it takes the attention off of themselves and makes them more relaxed. For this particular shoot I grabbed the red wagon. Once things started going downhill I also grabbed their bribe which was purposefully red heart lollipops so that they could be in the photographs too. See? That’s using my noggin ya’ll.
• Be prepared to take tons of pictures – And by “tons” I mean thousands, seriously. For this particular Valentine’s Day shoot with 3 kids I took almost 150 pictures and I literally have 2 pictures out of the bunch with all 3 kids looking at the camera at the same time.
• Use a bribe as a reward to get the kids to pay attention – I know, I know. But you know what? It works.
• Be loud and use noises – This is vital for getting babies and little kids to look at the camera. The more obnoxious and clown-like you are the more they will look and smile.
• Wear comfortable clothing – I get on the floor, I roll in the grass, I squeeze into crevices all to get “the shot”.
• Don’t be surprised if your photo shoot turns out NOTHING like you planned -that happens to me all the time. I figure that as long as the general idea of the photo shoot (see above) was acheived, that is all that matters.
• If your kids won’t look at the camera, take pictures of them looking at each other or at something else – Those pictures of their kid-to-kid interaction are usually my favorite.

With all of these tips for taking themed pictures in mind, I couldn’t wait to take pictures of my kids wearing their new Cookie’s Kids clothing. Here’s exactly what I chose, so you can go buy it too!

I chose a X Label “Melstone” Cardigan for my handsome oldest son.  Originally $30.00 this dapper cardigan is a steal!

 I chose a pair of French Toast “Alliance” Jeans in size 12 months for the baby. At 8 month’s old he is a little chunker and he wears jeans well. I absolutely fell in love with the red stitching detail of these high quality jeans.

 Of course I chose my daughters outfit first on Cookie’s Kids and planned the boys around her. Girls are special that way. I chose the Kids Headquarters “Bow L’Amour 3-Piece Outfit.

 As you can see from this pic of my shopping cart before I made my final decision  I also looked at all of the Girls Dresses, there were so many cute ones to choose from.

Here is the link to my entire Valentine’s Day Shopping With Cookie’s Kids #CookiesKids Google + Album experience. You can see from start to finish in a series of photographs how our themed photo-shoot went!

Check out Cookie’s Kids for more!

I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community.  This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ and CookiesKids.com #CBias #SocialFabric. All opinions about the awetasticness of the clothes are mine.