Beautiful.

Touching, Unguarded Portraits of Sleeping Parents-to-Be.

A few years ago, Russian photographer Jana Romanova‘s social life took a turn. All of a sudden, it seemed, all of her friends had become pregnant.

Just as quickly, all their conversations turned to children: things they needed to buy, changes they needed to make to their homes, and the daily difficulties of pregnancy. “It was a challenge for me to get used to it,” Romanova said via email. “I always try to solve my problems with photography, so I decided to make a project about it.”

She started her series, “Waiting,” by photographing her friends sleeping early in the morning in their bedrooms—a time, as she wrote on her website, “when people don’t really care about their appearance and one can see their attitude to each other and to this life that is growing inside their family.”