Nine Months In. Nine Months Out.

Nine months it took to grow you and bring you into this world.

And now, nine months of you being the light of ours.

I’ve been meaning to share these photos because they capture this little boy at an age I wish I could somehow freeze.

Brooks has a smile that makes strangers stop us everywhere we go.

I’m an introvert who can be extroverted when necessary, so talking to strangers is not always comfortable for me. But it seems talking to strangers about Brooks and our life is my new norm. He grabs the attention of people everywhere we go!

He is social and bold and curious about absolutely everything happening around him. He wants to know who you are and what you’re doing and probably what you have in your hand. And he LOVES clapping for you and himself 😊

But underneath all that confidence is this incredibly sensitive little soul. And a little rule follower.

If another baby cries, he notices. He’ll stop what he’s doing and look at them with this concerned expression, like he needs to make sure they’re okay.

If I tell him not to touch the dogs or play in the plants, more often than not, he listens. I know this is likely short lived!

He looks so much like his daddy.

But I see myself in him too.

And every day, we’re discovering these little pieces of him that aren’t Brian and aren’t me.

They’re just Brooks.

His personality. His preferences. His expressions. His determination. His sweetness.

Getting to discover who he is might be one of my favorite parts of being his mom.

Nine Months In

There is something about reaching nine months that feels especially significant to me.

Nine months growing him inside of me.

Nine months now getting to know him outside of me.

But, of course, our journey to Brooks began long before pregnancy.

There was infertility. Age wasn’t on our side.

Six rounds of IVF.

Appointments. Shots. Procedures. Waiting. Failed transfers.

Hope followed by disappointment followed somehow by finding enough hope to try again.

There were plenty of moments when I wondered if this little person we wanted so desperately would ever exist.

But Brian and I refused to stop believing it was possible.

And then, eventually, there was him.

I look at these pictures and sometimes still can’t believe we get to be his parents.

The little boy we hoped for is here.

And he’s better than anything we could have imagined.

The Part You Can’t See in These Photos

There is another reason I know these photographs will always hold a particular place in my heart.

They were taken five days after I was diagnosed with cancer.

Five days.

My world had just shifted underneath me.

I was still trying to understand what was happening. There were scans and appointments and questions I didn’t know the answers to yet.

There was fear.

There was sadness.

There was jumping to worst case scenario that Brian would be a widow and Brooks would be motherless.

There was a word that had suddenly entered our family’s vocabulary that I desperately wanted to give back.

Cancer.

These photos had been scheduled long before any of that happened.

We could have canceled them.

We didn’t.

And I am so grateful.

Because when I look at these pictures, cancer isn’t what I see.

I don’t want cancer to own these photographs simply because of when they were taken.

These are Brooks’s nine-month photos.

They are about him.

His smile.

His personality.

Those cheeks.

Those four little teeth.

The way he lights up our lives.

The incredible privilege of having had nine months with the little person we spent so long hoping would exist.

Cancer is part of what was happening outside the frame.

But for that hour, it didn’t get to take up the whole frame.

For that hour, there was only him.

I Was Just His Mom

I wasn’t thinking about staging.

I wasn’t thinking about treatment.

I wasn’t thinking about what the next several months might look like.

I was watching my baby smile.

Trying to make him laugh.

Watching the photographer capture expressions I see every day and desperately wish I could bottle up forever.

For that little window of time, I was just his mom.

And maybe that’s part of why these photographs mean so much to me now.

Cancer entered our lives.

It did not erase everything else that was already here though.

There was still motherhood.

There was still laughter.

There was still this beautiful little boy becoming more himself every single day.

There was still so much joy.

These photos also remind me of something I really need to remember right now.

I’ve stood at the beginning of a hard chapter before without knowing how it would end.

Infertility asked Brian and me to keep going when we had absolutely no guarantee that continuing would lead us where we wanted to go.

There were disappointments that felt enormous at the time.

There were financial sacrifices.

There were prayers that seemed unanswered.

There were moments when hope felt almost foolish.

But somehow, we kept finding enough of it for one more try.

And God carried us through.

Eventually, He gave us Brooks.

So when I look at these photographs now, I see more than a beautiful nine-month-old baby.

I see evidence.

Evidence that we have walked through hard chapters before.

Evidence that something can feel impossible while you’re living it and still eventually lead somewhere beautiful.

Evidence of God’s goodness to our family.

That doesn’t mean I understand why cancer is part of our story.

I don’t.

It doesn’t mean I’m not afraid.

I am.

But when fear tells me I don’t know what happens next, I can look backward.

And there he is.

Smiling at me.

A living, giggling, crawling reminder that I have been carried through uncertainty before.

God carried us then. I have to believe He will carry us again.

The Person Behind the Camera

There is another person who will always be woven into these photographs.

Our photographer has now captured so many of the chapters that brought us here.

She photographed me while I was pregnant with the baby we had waited so long for.

She photographed him when he was brand new.

And now she has captured him at nine months, becoming this funny, curious, joyful little person.

She has also walked through challenges of her own this year.

And still, she shows up.

She continues to step behind the camera and preserve the lives of the families she photographs.

Somewhere along the way, clients become friends.

I don’t know if she realized what she was giving me when she took these pictures five days after my diagnosis.

She wasn’t just documenting a milestone.

She gave me photographs of an hour when fear wasn’t the loudest thing in the room.

She captured my son exactly as he was at nine months.

And she captured me looking at him and remembering exactly what mattered most.

I will always be grateful for that.

Nine Months With You

Someday, Brooks may look at these pictures and know what was happening in our lives when they were taken.

I’ll tell him.

But I don’t want the first thing he hears about them to be that his mommy had just been diagnosed with cancer.

I want him to hear about himself.

I’ll tell him that at nine months old, his smile stopped strangers.

That he wanted to make friends with everyone.

That when another baby cried, he worried about them.

That everyone said he looked like his daddy.

That his mommy insisted he had her eyes and smile.

I’ll tell him how desperately we wanted him.

How hard we fought to get to him.

How much joy he brought into our lives simply by existing.

And maybe someday he’ll understand that during one of the scariest weeks of my life, he didn’t need to do anything extraordinary to help me.

He just needed to be Brooks.

Nine months in.

Nine months out.

What a privilege it has been to know and love you in both.

You were worth every appointment.

Every shot.

Every disappointment.

Every prayer.

Every time we refused to give up.

And you are worth every fight now too.

These photographs will always remind me of a chapter we never anticipated.

But cancer will never be the most important thing happening in them.

You are.

And thankfully, our photographer already has another milestone to capture.

In a few months, we are going to hand you an entire cake and encourage you to make an enormous mess while a camera documents it.

After everything it took to get you here, this feels like an entirely reasonable way to celebrate one whole year. 🎂

I have a feeling those pictures are going to be pretty great.

But more than that, I have to believe something else:

Some of our best pictures are still ahead of us.

With love, in the meanwhile. ❤️