I just wanted to take a minute to share one of my sessions from the holidays. Blog readers first met this beautiful family after their maternity portrait session, posted here. I had a feeling the little guy was going to be one awesome Big Brother. He was so sweet and gentle with his baby sister, and so lovingly protective of her. As soon as I arrived, he ran to get the hand sanitizer before I held his sister.
This precious baby girl was only five days old when we met. Miss R was bright eyed and alert. She watched us with such a calm demeanor. She was curious and content.
After the session, their mother emailed me to thank me for the portraits. And she said, “I can’t tell you how happy I am to have done these portraits and I thank you for your wonderful work.” I’m also so happy when a client chooses to capture these fleeting newborn days in photographs. For me, as a mother of three, I’ve seen first hand how those first few days slip by. When I was pregnant with my daughter, now sixteen months old, I could not wait for all the newborn images I planned to capture. I had them in my head, in lists on my computer, and in sketches on my desk pad. And then she was here! She was beautiful, and perfect, and sleepy, and peaceful. And I was exhausted. (No surprise, right?) I took a few shots in the hospital, and a few more when she was about 5 days old. Just a few. Hardly any of the ones I’d planned.
And I was saying to myself, “I’ll take a few more tomorrow.” Tomorrow became the next day, and that became the next week. Then she had newborn acne, a wicked case of it, and she had jaundice and had to spend her whole day on the bilibed. So what happened? The Photographer’s Child had No Portraits. Time ran away from me. She wasn’t a newborn anymore. She was four weeks old, then six, then twelve. I missed my opportunity. The newborn days were gone in a blink. Truly, looking back today, how I wish I’d hired a professional photographer for my own daughter’s newborn portraits!
Of all the moments and milestones I am privileged to share with my clients and their children, the miracle of a newborn is my most cherished. Because I know what these portraits will mean to the parents later. I know how quickly their babies will grow and change. And I know how their heart will feel when they look back at those first few days, as they fell in love with their child for the first time.
