The moment your baby is born can be very special, but there’s usually a lot going on too. What happens straight after birth will depend on your 𝑙𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑟, how your baby is born, and how quickly your baby adapts to life outside the 𝑤𝑜𝑚𝑏.
For nine long months, parents dream of and imagine their new baby. Preparing their home and nursery, scouring the ultrasound pictures for WHAT their baby will look like, dreaming of all the things they will do with this kid. And many parents plan especially for the first few hours of the baby’s life.
A mother could imagine the first moment she held her kid and felt it in her arms. She could be looking forward to seeing her newborn’s face for the first time and staring into her baby’s eyes.
The moments after you give birth are such a blur — it’s hard to remember, vividly, what happened in that first hour of your newborn baby’s life outside the womb. Bryanna Field, a Minnesota birth photographer, provided two striking before-and-after images to show new parents exactly how much does, in fact, happen.
The first shows a baby immediately after childbirth, and the second is that same infant, just “one hour later,” Field, who owns Swaddle Shots Photography, told 𝑃𝑂𝑃𝑆𝑈𝐺𝐴𝑅.
In the initial snapshot, the crying baby’s skin is still covered in a thick, white layer of vernix caseosa, which protects their delicate skin from the acidic quality of the amniotic fluid.
The second, cleaned-up image is the lovely, cinematic vision of a newborn infant that most people have in their thoughts — smooth skin, pink cheeks, and calm, sleeping eyes.
It’s a great reminder of how fast time goes with a newborn, how things change in the blink of an eye . . . or within 60 minutes in the delivery room!
