Our Pregnancy Journey
This is a bit of a different one from me today! As I write this, I’m heavily pregnant and literally two days away from my due date. Very soon I will be able to say I have two under two. *Note as I finish this, I’ve got an 8 month old, ha!* I have been a wedding photographer for some years now, so I feel like I’m in a pretty good place to talk about this subject! Over on my Instagram stories I asked if anyone might be interested in a post on this and I was completely overwhelmed with the amount of people that said yes, so, here I am.
Before we get in to the above though, lemme tell you our story to put it all in to perspective a little bit. I’m by no means an expert on the topic, I can only talk from my own experiences but here’s our journey of balancing work and pregnancy.
We had our first daughter Astrid in October 2016. She’s our rainbow baby – a baby conceived after a loss, if you’re unsure what that means. We had a miscarriage before her.
We were lucky in that we got pregnant with her reasonably quickly, a few months I think it was. As far as ‘planning’ went, because of the miscarriage before her, it had sort of all gone out the window with ‘ideal’ times. However, when we fell pregnant with Astrid, I suppose it did work out reasonably well in that I only had to cancel a handful of weddings that year.
Once we Astrid in our lives, there was never any doubt that we’d have a second, and for us both, the idea of having the two close together appealed. However, as I was still breastfeeding Astrid, it often delays the return of your period, which it had for me. Although we knew that it is possible to conceive before your first period returns, the likelihood of you timing it in such a way that you’re successful is so slim, so we presumed that it would be some time before we would be thinking about babies again.
We were completely shocked because of the aforementioned, but entirely over the moon to find out I was pregnant again.. This time round, we hadn’t put any thought in to planning timings as it was so unlikely, and a due date mid-June resulted in almost 2/3 of my weddings being cancelled last year… not the most ideal, but having the first summer off with my family in years is something I was super excited about.
So, that’s our story and it brings you to the rest of this series.
- Planning and Timing Pregnancy as a Wedding Photographer
- Tips for Working as a Wedding Photographer Whilst You’re Pregnant
- Telling Your Clients
Start where ever feels right for you, or just read the sections that will be most helpful. I’m certainly not a pregnancy expert, but having done this twice so recently, I’m writing this in hope that it’ll answer some questions I had the first time around. I’d love to hear what you think on Instagram or via email!
Photo credit to the lovely Ellie Gillard.