I know birth photography isn’t for everyone, but for some of us it is such a wonderfully significant milestone it’s worth documenting. I am currently working on doing multiple guest post about my natural birth experiences. I had to dig the digital photos out of the archives to get to my pictures for these blogs, but after looking through all of them and reminiscing I knew I just had to share some of them on Messy Mom.
For how different each one was (birth center, Texas, home birth, water birth, hospital birth, Kentucky…) All of my pregnancies and deliveries have been quite predictable, which is a blessing. Without further ado here are some black and white photos of each stage of my last three pregnancies and deliveries.
The belly
Ah, yes the retro iPod. This was at about 37 weeks with Z.
Full term with SJ
Days before Ezie’s birth.
I tend to carry all of my babies the same I guess. I always gain 25 pounds and I usually don’t get stretch marks… until the end. Ha, you thought I was one of those lucky women, but no.
Labor
My first baby. Laying on the bed at the birth center. J said I was mean. I don’t remember that!
I have almost NO photos of labor with SJ because the photographer and the midwife got there right when it was time to push, but here is one strategically cropped photo of me in the bathtub in our home. I was literally crowning and that’s my midwifes head in the foreground. Sorry if that’s TMI for anybody.
Here is a shot of me swaying with my husband during Ezie’s labor. I did eventually get in the water though after I progressed a little more.
Delivery
I’ll spare your the graphic photos of when Z was born, but J was the catcher and here he is with my midwife the very moment Z was delivered.
Seconds after SJ was delivered.
I don’t even have my arms around Ezie yet in this photo. It’s the very moment he was born.
Meeting the Family
The grandmas meeting our first born.
Big brother and the grandmas meeting SJ at our home birth.
Z and SJ meeting their little brother for the first time.
The First Look
Here are the first close up shots ever taken of my three little angels.
Z
SJ
Ezie
Stay tuned for the 4th installment, which will be about a month from now!
Amazing and touching photos! It looks like you had a great birth experience. Congrats on your new addition!
These are so beautiful Natalie! I wish I had thought more about this before I had my girls. I think I was so consumed with everything else, it fell by the wasteside. I definitely think there’s great beauty in them – if I had to do it again I would definitely do a better job of taking these significant photos! ❤️
Love these! I can’t say that I really enjoy labor, but birth really is a beautiful thing. I do not have many (any?) pictures from my labors. I really enjoyed seeing yours. And I still use my retro iPod!
We do too! Ha ha. I thought about passing it along to our 8 year old (because our phones and computers have kind of taken over for music), but my husband said he still uses it and likes to have that option.
Amazing!! These photos are so precious and the moments captured are so REAL. My sister took pictures (from behind me) during my daughter’s birth and its an amazing thing to be able to look at myself with my baby in that moment because it was like tunnel vision, I wasn’t aware of what it might have looked like from the outside. Thanks for sharing!
I was debating how many pictures I should share from Luke’s birth with the world. I am inspired now to do more than I originally planned. Thanks for opening up to all of us. I like you love birth stories. When deciding between doulas I almost picked the one we didn’t like as much because she was a professional photographer. Eventually we made the right choice to pick the one who is a better fit for us. 🙂 Maybe a birth photo post will be coming soon. 🙂
YES Amanda! I would love to see that. It was hard for me to decide what to share and what not to because first of all I am pretty modest about how much skin I show so even though I think it’s totally different than other circumstances I still try to be cautious. Especially of SJ’s birth because I was completely nude, most of them are definitely never going to be seen by anyone!