Blog 9: Maternity Shoots, Happiness on The Way
Hello, Jesse again.
I thought this week I would go back to writing. VLOGS are great, but somehow my awkwardness doesn't translate well unless it's highly edited or highly rehearsed. I'll try again later.
Recently, I did a maternity shoot. I don't do them often. I don't know why I don't do them often. Normally I do photos after the baby has been born. In this case, I was given an opportunity to not only do the photo shoot, but do it at Decew falls in Niagara. I love that spot. Stupidly, we recently discovered it during a wedding. Perhaps we should get out more. I didn't know that piece of paradise existed so close to our base.
Maternity shoots are a fun thing to do. The mom's sometimes tell their stories which are always interesting. You get to learn if they know the baby's gender or if they have a name picked. It's special. The thing I find most powerful about the entire day is, as a man, I don't attend many, if any baby showers, so the idea of being involved in a celebration of a new life being born is amazing. When I was doing baby photos, every so often I would stop to think about how much of a miracle having a baby is. You made a baby. You made a life.
To quote Bill Bryson, author of 'A Short History of Nearly Everything,' among other books Eric Gervais would be surprised I read: Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you. You now get to pass the torch."
Talk about powerful.
To all the parents who are waiting patiently and anxiously for labor to begin on its own: Remember that this is your first act of selflessness as a mother. There will be many more.