Blog excerpts not showing anymore

I have a child theme setup. Before doing anything, i set up my blog page (settings > reading > post page) and selected in highend options > blog settings > show full content > off, then selected excerpt length of 50 words. This automatically took posts without a excerpt in the excerpt field and generated the copy in the appropriate section of the template.

Then i wanted to test an excerpt on a post to see how it affected the design, and what happened is that all the ones without any copy in the excerpt field went blank on the page. That is not what i wanted, so i deleted the excerpt out of the post and updated it.

However, it will not go back to the former design. All excerpts are empty and the blog template is not showing any copy anymore. how do i fix this? i have tried deleting out the post that i tested, even removing it via myphpadmin tables. it is frusting me to no end. I want the theme to automatically generate the excerpts from the post content like it does out of the box.