34 images capturing close-ups of a normal birth filled with suspense and the mother’s humorous expression when she first saw her baby
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Babies are born at 2 in the morning. They’re born on the weekends and during snowstorms. And yes, babies are born on holidays.
This one is for our birth workers oᴜt there: the doulas, birth photographers, midwives, nurses, and OBGYN’s who share Thanksgiving, New Year’s Day, or their birthday with a baby. It’s also for our bodyworkers, like chiropractors, massage therapists, and lactation counselors who dгoр their lives to support a new one.
This little baby decided to start the beginning of their birth journey on Christmas Eve. And, because they weren’t in much of a гᴜѕһ, decided to wait until the day after Christmas to actually show up. As we’ve said many times, babies have their own plans.
Life is full of pivoting. As a birth worker, it’s being willing to ргeѕѕ pause on a turkey dinner to support a birthing parent through labor and delivery. As a team here at Gather Birth Cooperative, we’ve supported hundreds of families in the Twin Cities through births, and for some, we’ve celebrated holidays holding their hands. The hospitals, birth centers and home births here in Minneapolis and St. Paul don’t close on a holiday.
Just like our lives are flexible for our families, we try and help them be prepared to let go and let happen all that can transpire during labor. Really, being able to adapt during labor is a great preview of the flexibility we learn as parents.
This beautiful birth story was full of so many pivots, plus a few that many families never experience. This parent made an intentional choice to build a knowledgable and caring birth team from experts here in the Twin Cities to help them through labor and the birth of their baby. Having the support system of their family, friends, Gather Birth doula and birth photographer, plus the expert care of St. Paul midwives, helped them navigate many pivots tһгoᴜɡһoᴜt this baby’s birth story.
While we can’t control how life makes us pivot and change our plans, we often have choices we can make from those moments. For this birthing parent, they worked hard to powerfully make choices to keep control of their birth story, even when at times, that may have felt impossible. As birth workers, we have the opportunity to choose whether we’d like to continue to do this work.
At Gather Birth Cooperative, our team has missed family dinners, Christmases, birthdays, other holidays, weekends, and sleep. We’ve time traveled through long births, bounced from one birth-y responsibility to the next, laughed and cried with our families. Every day we continue to choose this work because it’s our vocation, our calling, our passion. So as families continue to show ɡгасe and flexibility with the changes life brings with birth, parenting and beyond, we’ll continue to show up to support them whole-heartedly through labor, birth, postpartum, and more.
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