Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
It has already been two weeks since our lovely daughter Flora was born and it has also been two weeks since my last post here on Hive, which is definitely the longest break I have ever taken from posting since I joined this community six years ago.
First of all guys, let me thank you all for the incredible response to my post where I informed you about the arrival of Flora. It was just a brief and spontaneous free write that didn´t even make much sense as I was writing it still in the hospital, totally overwhelmed by all the emotions, but your feedback was absolutely breathtaking and heartwarming. There is more than 200 comments under that post and I thank you so much guys for all the lovely words, congratulations, wishes and encouragement.
Now, two weeks later, I´m here with another little update. So how are we faring? Well, it has been tough. Tougher than we could ever imagine but we are trying and doing our best. We are not the youngest parents for sure but it´s our first baby so everything is new to us. As some of you know, me and my wife have been living very free and light-hearted nomadic lifestyle with practically zero obligations and commitments for more than a decade but now there is this tiny little human that needs us and that we are responsible for. That´s a big change. Moreover, as I mentioned in the previous post, the delivery was far from smooth so during the first days, I actually had to take care of both my wife and our daughter. It´s much better already as my wife has been recovering amazingly but it will take a lot more time before she heals completely, both physically and psychologically.
As for the parenting itself, they say that the postpartum period (the first six weeks after the birth) is an emotional roller coaster and we can already say that it´s totally true and apt. I know it mostly applies to the mothers of course but I realized that I never was this mentally unstable in my life as I have been these days. The emotions vary greatly from fears, concerns and frustrations to pure joy, elation and happiness. Sometimes, it feels like the most amazing experience in the world but at other times, for example when we are totally exhausted both physically and mentally, I have doubts if we are good parents or will ever be and I also miss our old life sometimes. Then, I regret those thoughts of course as I know that our daughter is the biggest blessing of our lives. So yeah, an emotional roller coaster indeed but we can already feel that it gets a bit better every day and we know that in a few months, we will be much more mature, experienced and mentally stable than we are now.
While we sometimes question our parenting skills, Little Flora (we actually call her Florinka or Florecita) definitely has been amazing at being a baby :) She was very little when she was born but she has been really trying to make up for that and her doctor is very impressed by how fast she has been growing and putting on weight. I´m sure that she will soon be our little big girl :)
Here are some pictures of our Florecita. She cannot tell us yet if she wants her face to be known here on Hive or not so we decided to cover it with little hibiscus emojis ;) Oh and talking about hibiscus...
...talking about hibiscus, here is another picture that I would like to share with you. We were actually very indecisive when choosing the name for our daughter. We had to go through literally hundreds of different names during my wife´s pregnancy and after a lot of arguments and selecting, we ended up with what we called the "Final Five" and those were: Maya, Jasmina, Luna, Flora and Izabela. There, however, we got really stuck and we couldn´t decide which one will be the right one. And then, just a few days before my wife went into labor, this hibiscus that we have had since we moved to Prague (more than 1.5 year ago) and never bloomed before, it suddenly bloomed like this...
We are not overly superstitious or something but in our situation, that moment really felt like a sign that Mother Nature wanted our daughter to be named Flora so we agreed on that name ;) Hopefully, she will like it. I think she will hehe :)
So that´s it for the first part of this post I guess and now a few lines about my future Hive engagement. As I already mentioned above, I really hope to have a bit more time for Hive gradually as we keep learning the ropes of parenting and the first thing I would like to do is to resume my regular contests. Some of you already asked about it and I hope to resume both my Monday tipping contest and my Thursday nature photography challenge from next week on. I did evaluate and pick the winners of the last rounds of both of these regular initiatives so hopefully, we can continue smoothly with nobody being deprived of any prize.
Other than my weekly contests, I would also like to post at least one more post every week, be it a real life update like this one or some travel / photography post from places that I haven´t got to write about yet. I still have a lot of cool unpublished photo material from Madeira, Prague, Krakow and other interesting locations but I don´t know if I find enough time to work on those long overdue posts. Will see. As for curation, I hope to be able to curate manually every day (including giving out my TipU votes), at least in my feed and in my favorite communities but I cannot promise the amount of engagement (especially comments) that I used to keep before. Thanks for understanding guys ;)
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Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about Nature, Traveling, Photography, Animals, Ecology, Crypto, Sport, Fitness and discovering secrets and beauties of the World, feel free to follow me as these are the topics I mostly write about. Have a wonderful day and keep on hiving, guys! :)
