Pregnancy Photos You'll Wish You'd Taken

Ask parents a few years out which pregnancy photos they wish existed, and the answers are strangely consistent. Almost nobody wishes for better bump portraits; the bump usually got its photos. What they miss are the frames around the bump, the ordinary ones nobody thought to take because nothing seemed to be happening in them. Here is that list, while there is still time to take everything on it.

The before

A photo from the week you found out, before anything showed. You, standing in the kitchen, looking completely normal and being anything but. The test on the bathroom counter, if that is your style, or just the two of you that evening, sitting on the couch with the biggest secret in the world. This is the only photo on the list with a hard deadline, and it is measured in days. It becomes the first page of everything, the frame every later photo gets compared against.

The ordinary Tuesday

The kitchen as it was. The car you will soon be threading a car seat into. Your desk, the couch corner that slowly became headquarters. These photos are worth nothing for about five years and then turn into time capsules, because they show the world the baby arrived into, the one that is about to be quietly and completely rearranged. Take them on a day when nothing is happening; that is the point of them.

The other parent

In most couples, one person carries the baby and the other carries the camera, which means the second parent barely exists in the record of the whole pregnancy. Photograph them: halfway through the crib instructions, reading out loud to the bump and feeling ridiculous, asleep with a hand resting on it, standing at the door with the hospital bag. The same imbalance continues after the birth, which is why we wrote about getting dad in the photos too; it is much cheaper to fix now, while the record is only nine months long.

The artifacts

The ultrasound printouts, photographed soon, because thermal paper fades; we cover the how and why in what to do with ultrasound photos. The name list with candidates crossed out, which will one day be contraband of the best kind. The nursery mid-chaos, all boxes and instruction sheets, before it became a room. The hospital bag packed and waiting by the door like a small monument to readiness.

The last one

On the way out the door to the hospital, take one photo. Nobody feels like it in the moment, which is exactly why so few of these exist: the last picture of your family at its previous size. Then give the whole collection somewhere to live in order. A pregnancy photo journal files each photo on its actual week, so the before, the ordinary Tuesdays, and the last one line up as what they secretly were all along: chapters.