If your baby was born 2021, chances are that so far, this hasn’t been the experience you’d hoped it would be. Us women often have this area of our lives mapped out in our heads for years ahead of actually having babies; What age we want to be when we have babies. In what order these huge life experiences would take place. What sex you wanted, maybe even what month we’d like our babies birthdays and some plan “trying” around this. One thing that no woman ever planned, or anticipated, was to have a baby born in lockdown.

You’ve missed out on partners accompanying you to your appointments. On your family visiting your new baby to welcome them into the world. Lockdown has a lot to answer for! 

Something else you may have missed out on is your baby’s newborn photography session. As a newborn photographer, and mum, I fully understand how disappointing this will have been. I have been gutted for my clients to have not been able to have their newborn sessions as planned over this last year due to lockdown. 

Having weather the storm with you all for this past year, I have plenty of experience of working with many parents in this position, and have become quite an expert on what options you have. If this is you then read on!

An Older Newborn Session

You may or may or may not know that newborn sessions are ideally carried out in the first 14 – 21 days of baby’s life. That gives us a very short window to work with which explains why so many have had to miss out. But do you know why the window is so short? This is mainly because before 3 weeks old, babies are still very sleepy. And they adore being curled up and reminded of the comfort and security they felt in the womb. Sleeping babies mean they can be posed safely and contently. All this makes a newborn session much easier.

But here’s the thing……… It’s not impossible to still get those sleepy curled up poses after 3 weeks. Each photographer will have there own policy with regards to age that they will attempt a newborn session up until. My own policy is that I will take newborns up to 8 weeks old. I refer to these as a older newborn session. 

So what’s the difference between a regular newborn session, and an older newborn session I hear you ask? Well, with older newborns there will likely be longer periods where baby is awake. This means that you are more likely to get images of your baby with open eyes than asleep. With baby awake and moving we need to use tools such as wraps to stop them waving their little arms and legs all over the place –  so you can expect your baby to be wrapped and swaddled during their session. You can also expect some totally unposed images with baby chilling and looking cute as a button. A huge bonus with older newborn sessions is that around the 4 -6 week mark baby’s eye contact rapidly improves, and they’ll start smiling. That makes for the most adorable images!

Depending on their little personalities, and how they are in themselves on the day, you may also be lucky and get some of the sleepy posed images that you can expect of the standard newborn session. I’ve even had some older newborns sleep the entire session better than the 2 week olds!

Here are some beautiful examples of older newborn sessions after lockdown number 1. Babies range from 4 – 8 weeks old.