This is a a personal post. I don’t normally post much about my persoanl life. I also don’t like to tell people if anything is wrong and usually say everything is all fine as really there shouldn’t be anything wrong as I should have dealt with it in my capable, independent way, solving the problem. This has not in fact been the case. Everything has not been fine. Everything has gone wrong. In the last two and a half months my husband and I have found ourselves staring blankly  at each other, wondering what else could go wrong. When it did go wrong, we were left reeling in disbelief.

I have just had a baby, and in the last few weeks of my pregnancy I had set aside time to finish all editing and complete work from this past wedding season, which has been a very busy one and an extremely tiresome one. Life does not happen the way we plan for it to. You don’t know when life will end and when it will begin. I do know however that there is a time to die and a time to be born.

My mother in law took ill and what we thought would just be an overnight stay in hospital on a drip to re-hydrate her turned into a little over 2 week ordeal which saw my husband and I visit the ICU twice a day. We would have to pass the Maternity ward on the way into the ICU at the start of visiting hours and then on the way out, after we had spent time seeing Dawn on the ventilator and all sorts of tubes going in and out of her body and had spoken to the nurses about her deteriorating state, we would have to pass the baby viewing window with happy faces all oohing and ahing over the newborns. The first week Nick and I prayed that she would come out the hospital in time for her first grandson’s birth but as the days went by and her condition got worse we prayed that she would still be alive to see his birth. It was so difficult walking past the smiling faces looking at the newborns. We didn’t know what to expect for our own sons birth, whether we’d experience happiness or some happiness accompanied by sorrow.

Dawn passed away 10 days before our son was born.

James Nicholas Laubscher came into this world bringing joy. We have learnt to be content in whatever state we find ourselves and most of all to feel joy despite the trials which faced us and which continue to face us. He has been such a blessing, sleeping and feeding and hardly keeping us up at night. Rebecca loves him with so much tenderness and care. Our family is content. If I told you everything that we were faced with, during his birth and the couple of days after he was born you really wouldn’t believe that we could endure much more. But we did. God has given us strength.

Thank you to everyone for your love and support and to my clients patiently waiting for photos. I am back in the office trying to get work out as fast as possible with James in his sling across my chest, peacefully asleep.

Here are a few photos from his birth which my good friend Kelly Daniels took.

I took a few photos of Rebecca & James as I felt I couldn’t only relive this time with iphone pics…

Kelly Daniels has started photographing births so if you’d like her to photograph your baby entering the world, send her an email.