How Does it Feel To Be A First Time Mum?

It’s amazing how you can feel so much joy!

That moment when you find out that you are pregnant and you really want to tell the whole world, but at least I did not dare until I had passed the 13 week mark. However I was a lot better at keeping it a secret than my hubby was he was bursting and told more people than I thought he would have that early. I of course told my family but that was pretty much it. Those 13 weeks did feel very long though I must admit when you have a secret that you just want to shout out to the world on the top of your voice.

Then I am not that person really to brag about things either, maybe being typical Swedish that way, so it did not come naturally for me to tell people, like how does that even come up in a conversation you have with a friend? My approach was if they saw it and asked the question I did not deny it.

Since you don’t have family nearby which most of the time is your natural network for all questions that you might have, I resorted to all the different women’s groups in Dubai trying to find all the answers I had from which prenatal class to where to buy and also what to buy, what are the first things must haves when you get home from the hospital. Me being Swedish my first store that was the top of my mind was IKEA and my husband being English his was Mother care so we naturally checked out both of them.

Social media such as the different face book groups with topics and some other local websites were very useful for us in how to find things we before had never even thought to look for in the stores. We are both long time Dubai residents so we have friends but none of them were in the same situation as us, i.e. having a baby right then, I did ask the friends that had children but many of them had forgotten about the first time of where to get stuff and what to think about, so the information they had was only some what useful for us. I then started to join a few of the new mums and bumps coffee mornings to meet ladies that were about to have children at the same time as myself. I can highly recommend those coffee mornings at least for the useful information the other ladies might be sitting on, they might have found just that one thing you have been looking for but not found. Its also great in theory anyway if you click with anyone and you can then have of play dates later on.
Before we found out that I was pregnant I had run my own very successful photography business for 5 years so I was naturally slightly worried about taking too long time off but I decided to slow down and take on a lot less work 4 weeks before my due date, I thought that sounded nice to have some time to myself to relax and get ready to never be alone again. But to my surprise our little bundle of joy decided to arrive 5 weeks early. I had a family photo shoot booked in for sunrise around 7.15 our baby arrived at 11.15 the same day. No I did not do the family photo shoot it was postponed, haha.

Having gone through birth and all the baby stages and still going through the toddler stage I can relate more to my clients during a photo shoot than I did previously so I believe it has made me a better family photographer. I have always photographed newborns for instance but now I feel I can better help the new parents during a photo shoot because I have experienced the same stages as they are going through. I also now know that babies are not as fragile as I thought they were I did not use to touch the babies a lot during my photo shoots they looked so fragile so I always asked the parents to change their position etc. Now I can confidently move them to what I have in mind for the photo session, I feel the parents are more at ease now as well when they see I can take charge of the situation it’s after all very new to them as well only a few days or so at least if it’s their first born.

Written by Helen Shippey
http://www.shippeyphotography.com/
http://www.shippeyphotography.com/blog