Go Vegan Calendar – February

Awwww. I love the photo from this month.

My niece came into town for a visit right when we were in the middle of shooting the calendar and while I had secretly hoped she wanted to take a photo for it -  I was prepared for her to be shy and say no.

Was I ever wrong. *laugh* My niece is more of a vegan-ham then I am!!

When she was little we used to goof around with photos/costumes/dress-up and even now she’s always making faces and posing for me and my camera. I don’t know why I thought this would be any different. 🙂

The hardest part of this shoot was keeping her from eating the cookies. We had to do lighting tests and stand in front of the camera while Uncle Gerry made sure everything was groovy before we started shooting.

She was begging me to eat a cookie and I promised her she could eat the whole plate once we got the shot … and then the bargaining started. *laugh*

“Auntie, what if I eat the cookie and it will look like an action shot in the photo.”
“Auntie, this one is cracked. I should eat it so nobody sees it in the photo.”
“Auntie, nobody is going to notice that I ate one cookie.”

I was very proud of her … She totally understood the kitchy nature of the photo (she knows her Auntie well) and she managed not to eat any of the cookies until we got the shot! Then hyper on sugar we opened my props drawer and we took a bunch of silly photos for fun. One of which also ended up on the calendar above the recipe.

The first 5 years of my nieces life I saw her almost every day. In fact she spent so much time with me that sometimes she would call me “Auntie-Mummy” and was as the inspiration for the children’s section in How It All Vegan. We tested a lot of those recipes together and I would get her feedback on what she liked or didn’t like. Even at 4 years old she was a great help with that chapter and for me as an Auntie it was really cool to have her be a part of the 2010 calendar as well.

In June of 2009 I sent her a bunch of copies when the calendar came back from the printers and my brother told me she immediately ripped it open and hung it on the wall of her bedroom. On the February month of course.   🙂