Make 'blog' page show content as well as posts underneath it

I have a page called 'blog' and I want to have the blog pages content at the top of the page as an intro and then underneath a list of all the posts. I've run into quite a few issues I'm not sure how to get around. Here they are...

• I have three posts at the moment, only post 1 and 3 are shown (post two isn't)


• I'm including the excerpts of the posts but post 1 displays nothing and post 3 shows the correct excerpt of that post


• On the search page (search.php) the same thing as above happens except that post 1 displays the content of the blog page itself as it's excerpt...?

So I was wondering how I could get around this all?

I'm using the following (I've removed the HTML/CSS so you can see the PHP better but kept the same layout of everything):

<?php wp_reset_postdata(); wp_reset_query(); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

   <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

      <?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) : ?>

         <?php the_post_thumbnail('thumbs'); ?>

      <?php endif; ?>

      <?php echo get_the_date('jS F Y'); ?>

      <?php the_title(); ?>

      <?php the_post(); ?> <?php echo substr(get_the_excerpt(), 0,200); ?>

   <?php endwhile; ?>

<?php else : ?>

<?php endif; ?>
<?php wp_reset_postdata(); wp_reset_query(); ?>

Any help on this please?