There are lots of things to do before starting a blog.  These things can include: blowing the dust off of your now barely-touched laptop, putting on a cardigan, fetching a fun-size milkyway (intended for trick-or-treaters but knowing full well you won’t open the door for the next 5 nights), picking a font, picking a new font, wondering how on earth one starts a blog and debate giving up before starting to save the hundreds (far fetched target, aim for more reasonable number like 3 readers so if 5 people read it you feel like a star) of eye-rolls and embarrassing yourself, and glancing over at your baby in panic that your chocolate-induced coughing fit will have woken her up… nope, phew!

So, I have a baby.  I’m not the first or only one to have a baby and think that blogging my thoughts would be a good idea, but from reading several parenting blogs over the last year I’ve come to realise that each of them have described elements that remind me of my own journey, making me feel less alone and bewildered (although not entirely, but what would motherhood be without the occasional bout of desperate blind-panic induced knee-clutched rocking in the dark), but every now and again I experience something wonderful/confusing/scary that I haven’t found the answer to in any of the blogs I follow.

Maybe some things are meant to be a mystery. Maybe you aren’t a real parent until you’ve been wide awake at 3am trying to find out why your baby is making ‘that’ noise, practically tearing your hair out while no amount of internet searches, phone calls to relatives or “expert” baby books reveal the secret, only for your darling baby to fall peacefully asleep and never do it again, leaving you to wonder if it will have made some major impact on her life only for it to not happen again until her first job interview and “ruin her life” (I’ve been told teenagers say this.  I’m sure I never did…) or maybe…it’s just nothing.

So what will my first blog be about? Let’s go for “introduction”. My baby girl Sophie is 6 months old now, and although so much has happened to her and I feel I’ve missed out by starting my blog so late I must realise that all the interesting stuff is not gone and forgotten (especially with the amount of photos I take of her every day) and actually, there are going to be so many more fun, wonderful and scary moments that I’ll soon have forgotten about the first 6 months of her un-blogged life.

I’m starting my blog 6 months after she was born as for the last 6 months I’ve barely had enough time to keep us both clean and fed and at the same time keep the house at a marginally acceptable state of cleanliness, so how people have time for hobbies, work, high maintenance pets (we have cats, so their life is now pretty much the same as before we were parents) or indeed blogs, I’ll never know.  And that’s with two of us sharing the parenting duties, don’t get me started on single parents, you guys rock, seriously.

I exaggerate about my incapability, I think I only lived like an unwashed hermit for a few weeks and then started to remember how life worked and, like everyone else will tell you – ‘it gets easier’.  And it has.  My house definitely looks lived in, has toys all over the living room, and there will always be a basket of clothes that needs washing or putting away, but I’ve learned the best times to get the hoover out or get the weekly shop done, and they usually coincide with when Sophie is asleep. And that is always, always when Damien is at home, as her naps must happen on a human, never in her cot.  I’m not blessed with a child who takes lovely long naps in her cot while I get to prance around the kitchen baking cakes or even get chance to clean the sodding toilet, she’s one of those “medium sleep difficulty setting” babies whose eyes snap open the second they enter cot airspace.  I’ll go into more detail on sleep in another blog, sleep deserves its own chapter, (or book, as I’ve tried reading one but turns out, babies don’t care what you read.)

I hope to cover as many topics as I can, as and when I encounter them, and try and backdate to the ones I’ve been through, including but not limited to: breastfeeding, baby essentials, weaning (which we’ve just started with Sophie) and holidays.

The one thought I will leave you with, whether you are pregnant, a new parent, an experienced parent, or anybody who fancies a read, everyone has an opinion and you will hear a lot of them along your journey.  I have plenty of opinions about parenting, some of which I have always believed and some I have realised since becoming a mother. I sometimes disagree with some opinions of others, but that doesn’t mean that either person is a terrible parent, just like how I like to think they don’t think I am for doing things differently to them.  The best thing I’ve found to do is listen to everyone, hear what they have to say, roll your eyes when you are alone if you have to, and make your own decisions about what is best for you and your family. I like to think of it as a pick and mix, one of those huge ones with plastic flappy lids as far as the eye can see, and just pick the things that look yummiest.