It’s been so long since I’ve shot a birth… Veda’s now just shy of 18 months and it was quite a while before that… It’s the one thing that is right up there for newborns with me in terms of… artistic gratification, but for completely different reasons…
While newborn photography is slow and methodical, telling a birth story requires the quick thinking and action left over from my days of shooting weddings, and I guess it feels good to flex those muscles sometimes.
This story is particularly awesome because 1) her mama is also a newborn photographer and 2) They were 3/4’s of the way through their journey to Ethiopian adoption when they discovered that after years of unexplained fertility and loss, she was pregnant. Basically the second I found out she was pregnant, I knew I wanted to be there . Here, their story:
It’s been a long journey to meeting our little Cora Fae. Jake and I got married and pretty quickly decided we wanted a family right away. We are both young & healthy so, of course, we just assumed getting pregnant would be easy. Some months went by but we were so excited to finally find out we were expecting! We started making plans to welcome a baby into our family, only to receive news a few months into our pregnancy that the baby was no longer with us. We were absolutely crushed but didn’t give up on our dreams of becoming parents. We found ourselves, again, trying to conceive, only to have months and then years go by unsuccessfully.
We had every test done to figure out why it wasn’t happening, and doctors could never give us an answer. We were perfectly healthy. We reached a point in our journey where we were told we’d only conceive with IVF, and that’s when we decided to pray about where our journey would continue. We really felt like God was leading us down a different path. We knew there were millions of orphans waiting for families out there, and that’s when we decided adoption was right for us. We longed to have children and these children longed for parents, so it was a no brainier once we really sat down and discussed it. We quickly started the incredibly long adoption process from Ethiopia. As many of you may know, adoption can be a very lengthy road. Just like going through the heartache of infertility, each month that went by without a “match” to our child was incredibly difficult. We had started a baby nursery and dreamed about the day we’d be holding our little boy or girl in our arms for the first time.
Two years later, we still hadn’t been matched with a child, but we got the surprise of our life. After over 4 years of trying to have a baby, we found out we were pregnant! We were so excited but knew our hearts were also in Ethiopia with our future adopted child, so we of course knew we wanted to continue our adoption even though we were finally pregnant. So here we are, with our gorgeous little miracle child and another in our future from Ethiopia. We feel so blessed we’ve been chosen to raise this little girl. She’s the sweetest baby, and we love her beyond words. She truly fits the meaning of her name, maiden of Faith.
note for photographers: I answer a lot of questions about the process/gear of shooting births in THIS POST HERE (it’s at the bottom of the post)
This particular birth was processed with the preset (unreleased til next weekend!): “agave” and the action “sweet cheeks” from the {let them be little} set available in the shop link above.
