It’s true what they say; the days are long but the years are short! Here I am, 1000 days of Sophia and also 1000 days as a Mum. Officially, anyway!

So, how to mark that? With a blog, of course! I was planning to spend yesterday evening crafting this blog by the fire, but in the end we were in children’s A&E with Sophia who decided to mark 999 days of being alive by fighting with a play park climbing frame and losing quite dramatically! Anyway, less of that right now.

1000 days as Sophia’s Mum. What to say?

There’s the practical stuff. More washing than I’ve ever done in the rest of my life put together. An eternally sticky and crumby car. Nappies smellier than I could have imagined, kisses sweeter than I could have dreamed of. There’s learning how far you’re prepared to stretch the 5 second rule. There’s toys and books and a horrendous amount of brightly coloured plastic. There was holding her head up, then watching her sit up, then roll, then crawl (for a couple of days), then walk, run, skip and jump.

Then there’s the emotional stuff. The transformation and expansion of my heart, which I was totally unprepared for. And although I can’t picture it, I have faith that it will happen again for another person.

There are soundtracks to my life that have evolved over time. When only a gentle shush shush would do. Then came the love of music, of listening to me practise my flute, of having ‘le go’ (Let It Go) on repeat for hours at a time. For a while, we sang Wheels On The Bus, and each member of our family had a different verse. On our family call, Sophia would roll her hands over each other, and all 6 of us would break into Wind The Bobbin without a word being spoken.

There have been bad days. Like yesterday at the park, and like when she ran out into the road outside church, and I couldn’t tell if she’d been hit by the oncoming car for a good few seconds. There were the days recovering from jabs. There was the night when she and I threw up within minutes of each other over and over again. But those days are few and far between, about 1% of the time, if my calculations are right.

We had the most beautiful breastfeeding journey. I say beautiful, it was brutal at times, especially at the beginning. But once we had cracked it, it was holy. I maintain that if I had a minute to re-live before I died, I’d be in bed at night, feeding Sophia, Nathan asleep next to me, the beautiful lullabies playing and the star light slowly turning. Sophia and I actually both loved feeding so much that we only stopped in January, three days short of her being 2 and a half.

I’m fitter and stronger than I’ve ever been with thanks to the supportive and completely non-judgement environment that is Sweaty Mama. It’s been such a life-giving part of the last thousand days, and absolutely not one I could have predicted because I always hated PE!

I’ve met some brilliant people in the past thousand days. Mums at various groups and classes. The caring people who have helped in a professional capacity, or just because they were strangers passing by, who saw I could do with a hand. Other families we’ve got chatting to at the park, in cafes, in church, in hospital waiting rooms.

And not least the people at ASSF. I wouldn’t have had the courage to make a move for my own sake, but I did it because Nathan needed his wife to be better and Sophia needed her Mum to be better. I believe I am.

Consistently, the hardest thing over the past thousand days has been Sophia’s sleep. She has always fought her sleep. I don’t remember a time she didn’t. She just wants to know what’s going on and I don’t blame her for that!

She does wake in the night, but that’s not the problem so much as it taking hours to get her to go to sleep. I mean it when I say this has impacted every area of my life. My physical and mental health, my marriage, my work, the state of my house, even, at times, my faith. Sophia is not the only person who has frequently cried in that nursery. For a long time, I was either asleep, at work, with Sophia or cleaning.

I did my research about sleep training and about how much it would cost to get help. I quickly realised that if I was going to go down that route it would mean stricter rules about how everybody cared for her, not just us. There would need to be changes; what she did when, what she ate when, where she was, and when. The routine would become incredibly important. But I couldn’t seek help for my own sake when everybody else seemed happy with the arrangements as they were. I put off getting extra support for over a year. It took getting pregnant again to do anything about it. Come September, I can’t spend two or more hours settling Sophia most nights.

So we’ve enrolled with the Rested Mama Official Community and again, like with breastfeeding, things are starting to take a turn.

Even with sleep deprivation, though, this has been the best thousand days of my life. And, I’m only 1000 days in, but so far, my least favourite were the first fourteen. It’s been uphill from then, even with the bad days.

When I was pregnant, my Archdeacon at the time said that God cares about how I am as a Mum much more than how I am as a Priest. I didn’t understand until Sophia arrived. The biggest task He has given me is to raise Sophia. And yet, there’s no school to prepare you. There’s no service that marks the beginning of this change. She just arrived, and I changed, in some ways slowly and in some ways quickly.

But with the help of our support network, we’ve come so far.

And now I’m sitting here, a thousand days in, grateful for each of them, and wondering what the next thousand will hold.

Photo at the top: the next chapter, telling Church that there’s a new baby coming!