Well, there’s another little blip in the excitement meter: I just got a call from the doctor! Blood work came back (about 3 days earlier than I was expecting it to) and everything looks good – no potential buggy things, and all my mineral levels and such are right where they should be. Brilliant! Coolest thing about this call though is the professional confirmation. So, I’m not crazy, not imagining things … we are actually pregnant! WHEE!! (Ok, I know, some of you might be suggesting now that perhaps we should have, you know, waited for ‘professional confirmation’ before spilling the beans … but neither of us really had the ability. We fail at secrets.)
Anyway … the point of this post was supposed to be to introduce you to my latest creative project. So, here goes!
Missing picture with caption “the first of many little paper butterflies!”
You all know that I am slightly obsessed with butterflies. And I’m sure almost all of you have heard the song “Butterfly Kisses”. It’s a country song, one of types of sappy songs Dad likes to play in the car when I am a captive audience so he can watch me cry. In picking the right video to share with you all, I must have cried 3 times in fact (and I didn’t even listen to the whole song each time). It’s a goodie. If you haven’t heard it, you can see the video here.
This song is part of my inspiration for the documentary project I’m planning for the next 8-ish months. With the advent of digital photography, maternity photography has become really big (pardon the pun) and there’s no way that I could miss this amazing opportunity for a creative series! There have been a couple of great time-lapse videos floating around the internet in recent months that really piqued my interest (check out “Introducing” and “How Babies are Made“), so there’s a small chance I may have had part of the idea sorted out before we even knew we were pregnant … ok, fine. I knew I wanted to do something like this shortly after we started trying – no harm in planning and dreaming a little, right?
Anyway … the idea is this: over the next 8 months I want to create a mural out of paper butterflies. Each butterfly will have a happy, baby-related thought on it – my ‘butterfly wishes’. I’ll add a butterfly every day or so with whatever is going through my mind about this whole experience. The mural will act as a backdrop for my portrait series, getting more elaborate and butterfly-filled as time goes on.
Even just starting this project has been a big step, because in a way it makes things more real. I have now started the process of documenting this. Something is actually happening. It’s still completely surreal and unbelievable, of course. But this makes is one tiny step closer to real.
Missing picture with caption “we’ll call this the ‘before’ image. At 6 weeks … there sure isn’t anything to show really – except my comfy new pjs!”