One Tree Photography

Last week I photographed two births in two days, a first for me. Gemma Jet was born at 11:14am on Tuesday, April 17th. Gemma is Lani’s first baby, and though she and Dex planned to give birth in their home, they ended up transferring during labor to Swedish Hospital in Issaquah. It was a long, tough journey, but Gemma was born into a room full of love and joy.

Lani texted on Sunday evening saying she had been having mild contractions since the afternoon and had had some bloody show the day before. I thought things would likely pick up during the night, but it wasn’t until six in the morning that Dex texted saying that Lani’s contractions were now five minutes apart and so intense she couldn’t talk through them, though they weren’t ready for me to take pictures yet. Those are good signs that things are moving along, so I packed up and headed their direction, hoping to avoid traffic. I hung out at Starbucks for a couple of hours when Dex texted again saying they had summoned the midwife and I could come on over.

When I entered their house I could hear Lani vocalizing through a contraction, and I knew that she was working hard. The midwife arrived shortly after I did, and after watching a few contractions, offered to check Lani’s cervix to see how far along she was. Sadly, even with all the work Lani was doing, she was just two centimeters. The midwife recommended relaxing in a bath and distracting herself with movies until contractions got closer together. Knowing how hard Lani was working already, I wondered how long she’d be able to keep doing what she was doing. The midwife left, and I headed home, half expecting/hoping to be called right back. But the afternoon went on and no calls came.

After a preschool board meeting that evening, I texted Dex asking for an update. He said that contractions were still intense, but they had spaced out to twelve minutes apart, and he’d let me know when things changed. I went home and went to bed with my phone right next to me. At 2am Dex texted again saying Lani had transferred to the hospital to get some rest with an epidural. She was seven centimeters dilated. It was so good to hear that Lani had progressed so much and that she was able to rest now. At that point she had been laboring for well over twenty-four hours already, and she still had a ways to go. I joined them at three, and was SO impressed with the care Lani received in that hospital. When I transferred from the birth center to the hospital with my first child, I had to fight with the staff over things that were important to me: things like avoiding episiotomy and delaying cord clamping. But each request Lani and Dex brought up to the nurses or doctor was accepted as the way that staff preferred to do things anyway. What a great (and different) experience!

I am thrilled for Lani and Dex. They had a long struggle, but I know they’d say it was worth it to hold their sweet daughter in the end. Here are a few images from Tuesday, after transferring to the hospital.

Lani did such a great job birthing her daughter. Check out how she held her own feet as she pushed. Yes, there’s some yoga at work there.

Sweet Gemma weighed six pounds eight ounces and was twenty and a half inches long. One long, slim baby girl! Congratulations, Lani and Dex!

You’d think that having a professional birth photographer as a close friend would be a fabulous perk (if you love birth photography and are having babies, I guess), but what you don’t know is that my friends have to wait, and wait, and WAIT to see their images, especially if their birth happens during my busy season. All this is to say that poor Kelly has had to wait a shameful amount of time to see her birth slideshow. Ephraim is now FIVE months old. I know, it’s terrible. But that’s the cost of being my dear friend, and thankfully, Kelly puts up with me. Here we go!

I wrote quite a bit of Ephraim’s birth story here, so today, I’ll just share a few things I loved about this birth:

• Dear friends. Kelly and I have been friends since our daughters were six and ten weeks old. Kelly’s husband, Lance, and my husband, Trevor, are scarily alike, and our families just GO together. I photographed her son, Peter’s, birth, and it was an honor to be there for Kelly again. It’s an incredible experience to be present at a birth, but it is even more amazing to watch close friends welcome their baby. Yes, there were tears.

• Being at home. Home brings context to  a birth. You are surrounded by your things, your people, your life, and your baby is born with all that history and love and comfort right there. I know that home birth is not right for everyone, but it is SO right for this family. I hope you see that context I’m talking about in the slideshow.

• The Miles Circuit. Kelly had LOTS of prodromal labor, and even when things got more regular, contractions were still spaced pretty far apart (15-20 minutes). And they were much more intense than you would expect from that spacing. Sometimes that kind of spacing and intensity can be a sign that baby is not in the ideal position for labor/birth, but that’s where the Miles Circuit comes in. It’s a series of positions a mama can assume that help baby get into a better birth position. I’ve seen it work twice now, and wow, does it work. An hour and fifteen minutes into the circuit, Kelly went from contractions twenty minutes apart to five. That’s good stuff!

• Siblings present. Naomi (4 years) and Peter (22 months) got to witness the birth of their sibling. During Kelly’s labor they bounced between playing with their grandma and good friend and checking on Kelly every once in a while. When things got more intense and birth appeared imminent, both kids hung out with us and took it all in. I LOVE that in their world, birth is a normal part of life. You’ll see shots of Peter being held by Nancy, a family friend, who offered reassurance when things got loud, and then moments later a shot of him playing happily on the floor next to the birth tub. You’ll see Naomi offering comfort to her mama with a touch on her shoulder, as well as inspecting the midwife’s toolkit, like the future midwife she is. Birth is a transformation of a mother and a father, but also of a family, and I think Ephraim’s birth illustrates that like no other.

• The gender announcement.  Naomi had the honor of announcing her sibling’s gender to us all. The expressions on Naomi’s face are so telling. She’s excited to see what gender the baby is, and then a little bit puzzled (and a tad let down?) when she saw that the baby was a boy (not the girl we had all been thinking it would be).

• Time for processing.  Ephraim’s birth was very different from Kelly’s other two experiences. And when we expect birth to go a certain way, because that’s what’s happened before, or because we have certain “plans,” it can take a while to come to terms with the way things actually happened. I know this first hand, and so do many, many other women. Sometimes time and distance and yes, I’ll say it, photos, can help that process along, turning something that might not have felt exactly right, to something that is actually empowering. I’m so honored that these images can be used for that purpose.

Now, here are a few images from Ephraim’s birth day.

And here you have the whole story.