Baby Smile Photography

The hospital photographer came and visited us towards the end of our hospital stay.  She said that we would get a free gift of one print from the hospital and then we could choose to buy any others.  We thought she would only take a few photos of William, but she must have taken 50!  (I was, of course, the nervous mom sweating as I watched the flash bulb go off over and over again and wondering if it was going to blind him.  Brand new mom nerves (even the second time around!) :-)).  We set up an appointment for a week later to come back and view our photos and see if we wanted to buy any.  We assumed we'd just be looking at proofs in an online gallery, but instead she had an entire box of things already printed with William's photos on them (a large photo canvas, a photo book, announcement cards, etc)!  This is what the whole set looked like:

It was definitely a savvy sales technique to show this completed set to hormonal moms (and dads!) in the first week post-partum...but the entire set was 299 Euros and we just didn't like the photos enough to buy the set.  (In several pics, William's eyes were half open so he looked dopey and one of the photos on the announcement card was a close up of his little fingers--cute, but he had a little wound on that hand from scratching himself!  Not a photo we would have chosen to highlight.)  I think the photographer was shocked that we didn't buy the set (we saw other parents walking out with their box in hand).  We did buy 3 prints that we liked.  I took photos of the photos so they are not the best quality, but at least you can see what they looked like.  I wanted to have a couple professional photos from the hospital; it's so sweet to see his little bare legs and his hospital bracelet.  He's wearing the hat and sweater I knit for him.

The photographer posed this bear on him.

 Below you can see part of the free gift: a little bandanna with William's name on it.  These bandannas are really popular in Germany.  The kids wear them like bibs--more stylish than the ones in the US!

 We're lucky that Jim takes such beautiful photos that we didn't feel the need to buy the set.  It was kind of weird, though, to leave behind the posters and huge canvas of William and wonder what they would do with them...Jim said we should stake out the dumpsters later--just kidding!  :-)

We gave our permission to have William's photo featured in the hospital's online photo gallery.  Here is the link: http://www.babygalerie24.de/sindelfingen-boeblingen/.  You can search through the January photos for William.  I also took screen shots of the pages so I always have easy access to them.  It is neat to see the names of the other babies who were born on the same day as our baby.