Wasn't I lucky this week getting to shoot baby Isaac? Beyond the visual, there's an entire aural symphony with a newborn--all his squeaks and coos and grunts--and I had forgotten how encompassing it is. How do we reconcile, as our children grow, the loss of such basic but extraordinary sensory pleasures? I know I often wished, as our girls grew, that there was a pill to take them temporarily back to that luscious, impossibly sweet size. On my own behalf, because I wanted to brush my lips across the top of a new little skull and its downy cap of hair, but for their sakes, too, because of the comfort a mother so completely offers to them at that age before they grow and we, inevitably, disappoint. Ahh, that age. All its sounds, yes, but all its crazy good smells, too, the milk and the baby powder and the subtle smell of fresh laundry. I was swept right back to the mesmorized maternal rapture that comes from watching a thousand fleeting expressions cross your baby's face, listening to his panoply of noises. Isaac has an incredible amount to say about his world, and plenty of it was grumbles about the photographer--all that hard black camera and the need for him to put up for a few minutes with being laid down unswaddled, when what he craved was the womb-like and endless dreaminess of his mamas' arms.
Baby Isaac arrived early at 33 weeks, a preemie, and he's just home from the hospital. His mamas are so incredibly smitten and proud and stunned. They wanted to remember Isaac just like this, just a bit over five pounds, still in preemie diapers, a trifle baggy-skinned. It's a good thing because, as this photograph I made attests, XS Baby Gap socks that ride up the thighs like hip waders won't look quite so big for long!
I went back twice to shoot Isaac this week, and I found myself wishing this is how every shoot was arranged. A first shoot just to get to know how each of us interacts, to size up expectations and soothe nerves. Then the real shoot soon after. Like an engagement shoot before the wedding, sort of.
It is such an honour for we photographers to be with our clients at such special times in their lives. We really have extraordinary access. I want to thank Isaac's moms for trusting me, and say to them: Your family rocks!
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