As someone who stubbornly refused to find out the sex of both my babies until the day I gave birth to them, I am clearly a lover of really big surprises (well, as big as a surprise can be when you know the outcome will be either on or the other!)
This Japanese mama, however, had gone into the labour ward having been told at several scans the baby she was carrying was a little girl, and so when she delivered the opposite, it is fair to say that she was a little more surprised than usual.
Koto Nakamura and her husband Sina Niakansafy, who live in Australia, had been told their unborn firstborn was a girl, and had been showered with pink gifts for their baby in the weeks leading up to the delivery.
When the baby was born, however, Koto’s midwife could inform the brand new parents that they had just had a baby boy – and luckily for the rest of the world, their birth photographer, Jessica Jackson, was there to capture the moment.
The irony is that earlier on in Nakamura’s delivery; her midwife told a story of a past client who had been told by ultrasound techs that her baby was one gender, only to be surprised when she delivered the opposite.
“We were all laughing and joking about it, saying, ‘Oh gosh, as if that would happen to us,'” her photographer told Today.com. “We were trying to imagine how the mother must have felt — little did we know it was about to happen to Koto, too.”
Jackson, who has been a birth photographer for four years, but has never been present for such a surprising moment in the delivery room, captured the new mom’s look of utter surprise when she learned her baby was a boy, and posted the image to her Instagram account last week.
“This was one of the most amazing moments — a roller coaster of emotions in just a few short minutes,” she explains. “Pure shock, disbelief, excitement, happiness and relief. This is the reason why birth photography is so important. Imagine when (the baby) is all grown up and his parents are telling his birth story to him and they have these images to share the way they looked when they found out this news.”
“I thought everyone was joking,” Nakamura herself told TODAY Parents. “I lost words and I couldn’t believe it until I saw his bottom,” she explains about the moment she learned she had a son, not a daughter.
The couple, who had planned to name their little girl Hinata, opted for the Taiga instead, a Japanese boy name meaning “big and gracious.”
(Image via @ittibittyphotographytas/Instagram)
