I couldn’t help it. I don’t normally share personal details with absolute strangers, but I just couldn’t contain my excitement. “My friend just had a baby! This sandwich is actually for her!” The guy behind the counter barely acknowledged that I had spoken. Maybe he didn’t hear me…or perhaps he, like most of us, think of birth as a rather ordinary event. After all, apart from making a sandwich, it wasn’t going to change his life.
Yes, a child’s birth is something both incredible…and in many ways ordinary. It’s ordinary to the doctors and nurses perhaps, ordinary to the people driving by on the street, ordinary to most of the world–but it’s life-changing to you. It’s a day you don’t forget.
Getting to be at a birth–let alone photograph it–is anything but ordinary to me. There is no show, no pretense…just raw emotion: excitement, worry, fears, hopes, dreams, anticipation–and work. Lot’s of work. It’s labor. And the reward is so sweet–a new life is ushered into the world, creating something that wasn’t there before: a new set of parents.
Baby Nathan’s birth story is especially sweet to me because his parents are good friends of mine. I eagerly awaited his arrival alongside of them, and I am so incredibly happy for them. Here are just a few of my favorite moments from their story.
by mary
Jenna - Beautiful, just beautiful.