As you may already know with this blog, I like to keep things honest. So I’m going to start things off by saying this week started with me struggling.

This isn’t the first time since considering myself clear of postnatal depression that I’ve struggled, and I know that it won’t be the last. Depression is a massive part of my life, and it’s always going to be there; I think at this point, it’s just a fact. I’m not going to go too heavy into details about why I might have struggled, but suffice it to say, that I very often find it difficult to feel like I care about people. I know that sounds harsh and stupid, but it’s also true. I know deep down I likely do care, but I think there’s a protective part of my brain that wants to shut it down in fear of eventually being hurt. It’s happened before, so it’s afraid of it happening again.

Anyway,  despite struggling, and occasionally feeling like I didn’t care about Isabelle, I was still there for her. No matter how bad I feel I will always be there for her. I was there during the worst parts of my postnatal depression when I felt like I hated her, so I’ll be there now. But Rachel did manage to grab this photo of us napping, and, since she mostly runs our Instagram, decided to put it on there:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bdc-K03jOZO/?taken-by=isabloguk

Excuse the obnoxiously large image above, if I could resize it I would, but I guess you have to deal with it. Not that it matters, you’ve clearly scrolled past it now so I don’t know why we’re still talking about it.

I did end up having a little bit of a breakdown a few days after I originally wrote this post, so you can read about that if you want.

How’s Isabelle Been?

Well I’m glad you asked. She’s been perfectly fine, as usual, and she’s really started to up her daredevil explorations into a dangerous, almost life threatening level. This is just one example of the types of places you can easily find Isabelle if you give her a mere two seconds head start on you:

Of course, that’s just one that we’ve managed to catch on camera. Most of the time I don’t get chance to go “oh, wait there a minute Isabelle, please don’t die whilst I go get my camera!” No, usually it’s “OH SHIT WHY ARE YOU THERE!”

It doesn’t help that she’s now gone from standing, to shuffling. She was bad enough trying to find her balance when merely standing stationary, so adding a whole lot of unbalanced movement to the equation means I have to play a lot more wicket-keeping. And that right there, is my first, and likely only, cricket reference. Here’s Isabelle doing the baby shuffle:

Other than all that, we’ve had the usual fun for the rest of the week. I’ve had a pretty easy week of it in terms of work (don’t tell Royal Mail), and as such have had more family time than usual. Not going to complain too much about that one.

Isabelle has also been happy to explore even more than usual, possibly due to that leap she’s going through, and it’s part of the reason I prefer to carry her around when we go places as opposed to using something like the pram. That way she can explore as we go around, I can talk to her about what we’re doing and she can be much more engaged with what’s going on. She can also stare longingly at doughnuts that she’s not going to be having for quite some time:

Well, I guess that’s it for this week. Coming up is Rachel’s last week of maternity leave. I shouldn’t really write that as she obviously proofreads these, and there’s a strong chance that that sentence is going to make her feel a slight amount of devastation. But the reality is she has to go back to work. I can’t be the only one bringing in the cash, now can I?

In all seriousness though, I am a little nervous about it all, but I’ll save that talk for next week, so mark your calendar for next weeks blog post, which usually arrives on a Sunday. Give or take.

Catch you again, possibly.