Thin Blue Line

A few weeks ago, I was staring disbelievingly at a little blue line.

Like thousands of women before me, a million conflicting thoughts raced through my head. I felt excited. I felt nervous. I felt unprepared.

My way of dealing with things has always been by writing about them, and as I’ve blogged for several years  (about makeup, fashion and all sorts of pretty things), here I am doing the natural thing and posting my thoughts, feelings and experiences about this whole, very new parenting thing I’m about to embark on.

At first I wasn’t sure whether I would just use my other blog to also cover ‘mummy’ topics, but it seems to me this thing is complex and has very different concerns, so I’ve decided to spin off.

I feel like such a hopeless newbie about all this- but the first thing I did was look for parenting blogs that could help me understand what I was getting into.

Writing this is an attempt to feel more connected and less clueless.

About me

I’m Sarah, a 29 year old marketing and PR specialist living in the East Midlands with my husband, Sebastian and our kitten, Shilling.

In November 2014, after two years of trying to ‘second step’ into a home more suitable for a family than our cosy two-up, two-down, we finally managed to pull it off and moved into a large Victorian semi backing onto the canal.

It definitely needs work, so we’ve been slowly doing it up – a process that is taking far longer than I naively imagined when we were only dreaming of moving!

Around Christmas, we started thinking about the next logical step – starting a family to fill all those empty bedrooms.

I was expecting the process to take a good few months, so we were very surprised when I fell pregnant straight away - before I’d even really got my head around the idea of trying.

I still feel like my mind is 20 paces behind my body. I’m now out of the first trimester, beginning to show a little (although it looks a lot more like a heavy lunch at the moment than a baby bump!) and still trying to believe that this is really all happening.

So I'm seriously about to become a mummy?

But why blog about it? Because there’s so much I don’t know! This whole thing is a mystery to me, and like a lot of new parents, I’ll be figuring it out as I go along.

I also want to be a bit of a blank slate. I want to go into this without a whole load of preconceived ideas about how to do this and that. That way lies madness. I don’t want to do it like my parents did, like my friends are, like I think I should be. I just want to be kind to myself and enjoy the learning curve. Embrace the unknown.

Also, I’m just a regular Joanna, trying to make it work. We see a lot of images of ‘perfect’ celebrity mums and parenting gurus. Motherhood is something everyone has an opinion on - even those who really shouldn’t! I like the idea of being an unknown voice.