I never recorded my body growing and changing when I was pregnant the first time and I always somewhat regretted it.  When I learned that I was pregnant with our second child I decided I wanted to do a ‘week-by-week’ picture of our new baby growing.  It would be a fun photography project and I would be able to see my belly grow like a flip book, but as the months progressed and as I sat down to put it all together, this project became so much more than that for me.

As much as I’ll never be that person who loves being pregnant (I just don’t enjoy being nauseous and throwing up for months on end, and being unable to sit or walk properly as pregnancy aggravates a back injury from years ago!) I think that pregnancy is a beautiful and special time in a woman’s life and deserves to be captured and recorded.  It’s the time before you get to meet your little one, but where you’re already getting to know him or her.  Their aggressive or gentle kicks, their hiccups – even though they aren’t ‘out’ yet, a mother gets this special time that no one else can share with her baby.

As I sit here writing this now, I’m eagerly anticipating our little one’s arrival – I’m less than a week away from my official due date!  This started as a one-picture-a-week kind of project, but it somewhat morphed when I finally started taking pictures at Week 16 of my pregnancy.  My daughter wanted to be part of it (although that eagerness waned as the weeks passed, and bribery became part of it for a few of the later weeks!) and I didn’t want to just include one image from each week.  I still wanted the ‘flip-book’ feel of watching our baby grow, but loved looking over the pictures of my daughter and I and where we were at that time, too.  Some pictures show cuddles, another shows her pretend ‘doggie’ (the ball on a string!), and some show the ‘baby’ in her belly, too.  She is so excited to be a ‘big sister’, and I love how you can see that in some of these pictures!  I love that she wanted to be part of this, too, because I’m already mourning how she’ll have to share the attention that I can give her when her new sibling arrives.  These pictures capture our special relationship – she’ll always be my ‘first’ baby, and my favourite image already shows her special love for her coming sibling.

(I feel like I didn’t properly ‘finish’ what I was writing above, but be sure to check out the special post-script below the photo gallery to see why!)

A special post-script

I wrote everything above while Hannah took her nap on April 21^st and planned to post it after Hannah went to bed that night, but the baby growing inside of me had other ideas… She made her entrance into the world that same evening!  Welcome to the world, Kara!

For moments like this, I’m so grateful for a quick phone snapshot… this is one of my new favourite pictures of our two girls together!