Planning Your Pregnancy

Planning Your Pregnancy: The Body

When you’re planning your pregnancy as a wedding photographer, you have a busy season in the spring, summer and fall.  The winter?  Well, that’s fairly open.  It’s the time when we recharge out batteries (literally and figuratively), get to catch up with friends and family and re-explore our own hobbies since we have a little bit of spare time.

Winter can also be the best time to give birth… should you have that luxury.

If you’re not pregnant yet, but are thinking of becoming pregnant you may want to consider having your baby in the off-season.  This means planning your pregnancy so that you’re delivering usually in December, January, February or March.

Now, let’s get real for a minute.  Getting pregnant isn’t easy for everyone.  In fact, it’s a downright soul crushing experience for some women who are dealing with infertility issues.  If you’re a wedding photographer and you end up getting pregnant with a due date in the middle of wedding season (like me!) it’s totally okay!! You don’t have to have your baby in the off season just because you’re a wedding photographer.

So let’s talk planning!Planning Your Pregnancy

 

I want to first start off by saying that you should always have open communication with your doctor or healthcare professional when it comes to planning a family.  Anything they say should trump what you read in a blog article; they’re the doctors – I’m not.  I can speak from experience; however, and that’s what this entire series of articles is based on.

A lot of ladies will use a period tracker app that predicts when they are ovulating.  Based on those dates, they try to get the timing of conception just right.  Unfortunately those apps aren’t always correct as some ladies ovulate earlier or later in their cycle.  Talk to your doctor about other ways of monitoring ovulation such as basal temperature and even using ovulation predictor kits.

If you can manage to achieve a December-March due date – that’s awesome!  You’ll be able to have your baby when life is nice and quiet, be able to spend countless hours bonding with your little one without worrying about the editing queue and you’ll have the time for your body to physically heal from the craziness that is pregnancy, without the pressure of scheduling shoots.

That being said… if you deliver December-March, you’ll be spending your entire wedding season pregnant.  Working 12+ hour days on your feet, carrying heavy equipment, working in super hot weather.  That’s not fun.  At all.

If you’re like me and end up delivering in the middle of the summer, you’re faced with a different set of challenges.  First of all, there’s a reduction in income as you will have to take a certain amount of time off from work after babe is born BUT when it comes to dealing with the nasty morning sickness?  Well, that all happened in the off-season!

Whether you’re delivering in the off-season or in the middle of the summer, what’s most important is that you put the steps in place to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself.  Yes, your business is important but that little life growing inside you?  That’s pretty darn important too which means you need to take care of yourself in order to take care of that sweet little babe, even if it means making kinda-scary decisions about your business.

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