The calm before the storm. But this mom is about to have her fourth child, and you can discern by the relative serenity on her face that she is an old hand at this. By now she knows exactly what to expect, and is not particularly alarmed.

The shadows in this photo have a certain Rembrandt-esque quality of their own.  In fact, it makes us wonder just what a camera in the deft hands of that Dutch master of masters of chiaroscuro might have produced . But Fate determined that he would predate that invention by at least a couple hundred years (give or take).

This photographer, on the other hand, although possessing only a tiny granule of his talent, has a veritable mountain of 21st-century photographic technology at her disposal.

It’s hard (impossible, actually) to do this kind of work without being moved to tears of joy, right alongside the other participants — beginning with Mom and Dad, but not only them, of course.

In fact, the photographer’s next equipment purchase will be salt-and-moisture guards for her photo-apparatus.

The attending M.D.  however, remains dry-eyed throughout. For him this is just another day at work, and he approaches the whole affair with clinical detachment, emotionally speaking — which is not to say, of course, that he is oblivious to the extreme gravity of the task in human terms. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Don’t be fooled by Doc’s stars-and-stripes headgear. His choice of same is based on an informal study at an unnamed, “Ivory-League” American university, where meticulous research has revealed that citizens exposed to standard icons of patriotism within the first four minutes of life are eleven times more likely upon reaching adulthood to actively and ardently participate in the democratic process.

But getting back to our been-there, done-that Mom…

Well, as things turned out, it was all over in such a jiffy that when the nurses went running to summon Dr. Delivery to the scene of the action,  he managed to arrive just barely in time to don his gloves and scoop up the child in mid-flight…

… which haste also accounts for the relative sparseness of this photographic coverage.

Apologies. But it’s the kind of thing that isn’t really in our hands.

🙂