Joining in...

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a wee bit anti social. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be, I value friendships, I like to have people around me that I can chat about the Bake Off with, drink ale with and recommend books to, but I find it hard, really hard.

When we first moved to St Albans at the beginning of Summer 2016 I didn't want to leave the house. Ever. Partly due to some mild postnatal depression, and mostly down to me being extremely anxious. Grayson was still throwing up after and in between every feed, he still wanted feeding at least every two hours, he was three months old, not napping and still waking every 40 minutes to 2 hours in the night. I was exhausted. I wanted to be at baby groups, my heart ached thinking of all the daft plans I'd had in my head of baby massage with my tiny newborn. I felt so much guilt. I just couldn't do it though.

Push came to shove when I won a place on a short baby course, I had to get out of the house every week for two hours. Other mums were there. 6 of us. Once we even stayed afterwards and had a drink. And then it ended, that was it. I didn't go to another group until my son was nearly a year old.

It took a lovely lady at the Sure Start centre to persuade me to come along to a messy play class, I was getting Grayson weighed, she worked there and reassured me, she even gave me her number and said I could call her and she'd walk in with me so that I wouldn't have to enter alone. I'm not sure she'll ever know how much that saved me.

The baby and toddler groups in St Albans were big, maybe because of that no one really spoke to each other, in the 6 months that I went to the groups (two or three a week) I only had one other mum talk to me, everyone either seemed to know each other or just kept to themselves.

I think that it was because of this that I was so nervous about going to new groups in the village after having moved. During the Summer holidays nothing had been on. I went to a couple of socials organised by people on the Mummy Social app and that was pretty much it for the first few months. 

Then it was September and it was time to jump back in. 

So far I go to two groups, one in my village on a Wednesday that is mostly attended by childminders and one on a Friday in the village across the road that is attended by some of the loveliest mums I have ever met. The smaller groups mean that I am forced to be in the thick of it, there's no disappearing into the sidelines here, and so far that's doing us just fine!

A whole new village

It's been a stressful few months, but it turns out not for the reasons I was originally anticipating. Going from a city back to a village - fine, having to drive pretty much everywhere instead of walk - fine, much much smaller baby and toddler groups - also fine, even unpacking everything that took me months to pack up at the beginning of the Summer was fine (turns out moving to a house with more than 4 rooms makes unpacking go a whole lot smoother).

Instead we've had issues with our previous landlord (still being resolved and still keeping me awake at night), issues with our deliveries - no one seems to be able to find our house, our fridge was a missed delivery twice, so we had nowhere to keep fresh food for the first two weeks. Our new fridge started freezing everything. It took them a month to come out and fix it. We lost over £100 worth of shopping due to it, bottles had exploded sending shattered glass everywhere. We all keep getting sick. I've cleaned up more vomit and shit in the last few months than I have in the entire time since Grayson recovered from reflux. I have a cold that never wants to end, currently surviving on flavoured coffee and strawberry cheesecake oreos to cheer myself up.

On the plus side I feel like I have the kind of family unit now that I had always dreamed of. Now that we're not constantly on top of each other and tripping over the dog everything is so much more chilled. This house already feels more like home than the last house ever did even though we were there for 13 months. We have the space to have people stay, my parents are literally 5 minutes down the road, we're nearly an hour closer to Tom's parents and my best friend. It feels like things are on the up!