Dear Autumn,
I can’t believe how big you’re getting. Sometimes it feels so long since you were born and you were so tiny, sometimes it feels hardly any time at all. One thing is for sure, I can’t imagine life without you and I’m so glad to have you in it.
Today is #TimeToTalk day, a day all about increasing mental health awareness by talking about it and perhaps reaching out to someone with mental health issues to make sure they’re doing okay. Here I have a guest post from a close friend of mine who had her daughter 7 weeks before I gave birth to Autumn and has unfortunately been suffering from OCD since during pregnancy. I’ll be posting about mental health quite a lot on my blog, so I thought it would be interesting to ask her to write a post for me about her experiences so I could find out more about what she’s been going through but also to spread awareness of perinatal and postnatal OCD.
Please be aware that as with lots of things regarding mental health, this may be triggering.
Last Friday I was over at Mummy Miller‘s blog, when a recent post of hers caught my eye; 10 reasons I’m #Rocking Motherhood.
We’re often so tough on ourselves as mothers and parents, so I think it’s important that every now and then we just take a breath and think about all the positive things we’re doing as parents. I enjoyed reading Mummy Miller’s post and at the bottom it said that she was tagging anyone who may be reading it that hadn’t completed this challenge…so, I thought I’d give it a go!
“She’s very quiet, why is that?” I remember my biology teacher asking my parents at a parents’ evening when I was about 13 years old. It was almost as though there was something wrong with me. For as long as I can remember, even as a child, people have called me shy and responded differently to me than they might others because I’m an introvert. It frustrates me somewhat, although quietly, because I don’t think I am shy. To me, I think of shyness as being when someone is afraid of speaking to other people – they want to revert back to that childhood behaviour of hiding behind their parents legs when someone wants to speak to them. That’s the thing…I’m not really afraid of speaking to other people and I don’t see myself as shy.
Yesterday, I read on Mumsnet that Gary Lineker has called for homework to be banned. He said:
‘Homework should be banned. All it does is drive a massive wedge between parents and children, because you end up having to do it for them, and it’s stressful. They get stressed and they don’t want to do it’.