Meet The Relatives (1)

So we took Holly on her first UK tour, up to Barnsley where great grandmas and grandads were waiting for her, with chocolate biscuits, cheese & pickle sandwiches and gallons of tea. At four days old, her face is changing every day, losing the extreme chubbiness which characterised her first few hours, gradually becoming – by popular opinion – pretty much perfect:

In the picture below, just out of shot, Holly’s Mum has lifted her legs in the air, showing her bum to the world while changing her nappy. That’s Holly’s legs and bum, not her Mum’s…:

And having mastered the art of the frown, the grimace, the quizzical look and the all-hell-just-broke-loose shriek, here’s Holly practicing the big one – the smile:

They say it’s simply wind, but what do ‘they’ know…

Holly Day Photos

I was sitting peacefully in our back garden, reading a book in the sunshine, late afternoon on Friday 11th September, 2009 – our due date. A date which has other connotations these days, and other, blacker memories, but for us it will now always be the day that our first baby announced that she was ready to arrive.

I’m half way through The Caine Mutiny, for the umpteenth time, when at 4pm, Marie called out to me from inside the house in a curiously uncertain voice. “Andy, I think me waters have broken…”.

Just over twelve hours later, neither of us were uncertain about what had just happened:

There she was, born at 04:36 on Saturday, 12th September 2009, our baby Holly Hiseman. I took the picture above just nine minutes after she was born…

We’d arrived at Peterborough Hospital’s maternity ward at around 21:30, after a few hours of tests and a short trip back home. Her mum Bev came with us, and her dad John stayed at our house with our 9yr old boy, Devon. By this time Marie’s contractions were pretty tough on her, but early on the trusty gas & air machine was all she needed:

And so began the long night. An epidural joined the gas & air machine, which relaxed Marie no end, but it was a gruelling few hours…:

When the final stage came, Marie gave birth astonishingly fast. The final push lasted just eleven minutes. For 45 years I’ve heard people rate their great life experiences against the moment their first child was born, and I now understand why nothing can ever top it. Miraculous, overwhelming, unreal, and brilliant beyond words.

For a long time afterwards, we – and Holly – were quiet, simply murmuring to each other, lost in the size of the occasion:

And through the next twelve hours of tests, examinations, form-filling and waiting around, Marie and Holly stayed almost supernaturally patient, quietly getting to know each other while the world around them went about its business:

Mid-afternoon it all changed, and the volume levels increased, when Holly’s big brother Devon got to meet his new sister for the first time ever:

Now, a day later, we’re all happily getting used to each other. We love little Holly May Hiseman to bits, and we’re looking forward to showing her off to all of our loved ones:

She’s beautiful.

Mischief

We went on a walk to try and encourage Marie’s baby to make an appearance – you’ll do anything when the nine months is up to get the baby out. I put the little 50mm prime lens on the camera and set myself the task of finding a picture or two that captured the character of the afternoon. There’s something about using a fixed-length lens which makes you work a bit harder on the composition.

Inevitably, Devon’s innate 9 year old sense of mischief meant that, more often than not, I swung the camera his way, because he was the most entertaining thing in the park that day:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/320 at f 3.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash. Look at those eyes – not an ounce of uncertainty.

Not far behind Dev in the mischief stakes is his grandma Bev, who as has been seen elsewhere in this blog, really doesn’t care. This isn’t a dance, it’s Bev trying not to get yet another smack on the behind from the whippy stick which Devon conveniently found on the ground:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/3200 at f 2.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash.

And this is Devon brandishing his whippy, bottom-striping stick having wrestled it back under his control. Oh God I hope he doesn’t turn out to be a boring pen-pusher later in life, this photo proves that – when he was nine, at least – he had all the good-natured fizz you could ever want in a person:

Nikon D300, Nikon 50mm f 1.8 prime lens, 1/1250 at f 3.2, ISO 400, hand held no flash. All images shot in colour and converted to Mono in Lightroom, then finished off in Paint Shop Pro. My usual workflow. I’ve got all the books, magazines and DVD tutorials, and Photoshop CS3, but you know I still think you can produce great post-production effects without going to the extravagance of Layers etc. For a photo blog, at least. I take the easy route because – at the moment – very few of my pictures ever get printed.

I guess Devon has to grow up some day, maybe we’ll look back on these images when he’s a stroppy teenager (there are already signs…), and we’ll wonder why things had to change.