Now, this is probably well into the land of too-much-information, but today is the first day I’ve had a period since I found I was pregnant with the witchling. It’s been twenty months in total, eleven of those since her birth; slightly less than the average onset of menstruation if you’re breastfeeding, apparently, but considerably longer than many. It’s funny – I expected to feel many things about this, and most of them related to the general tedium of periods. I mean, nothing which involves cramping, tiredness and general irritability can be entirely welcome. But I didn’t clock that I’d feel sad. And I do. Not in a terminal, woe-is-me-now-hire-a-herd-of-mourners way, but more in that until now, I had felt as if the witchling and I were still a little unit, floating around in our little world of milk-related goodness, and completely in harmony, and now here I am, off on my own again as the witchling’s need for milk gently diminishes over time.

It is, of course, quite right and natural that this need diminishes; she feeds about five or six times in a day, and we both love it, but after her initially exclusive diet of breastmilk, she is finding more and more to explore in the world of food, something which is delighting to both Quercus and I. I enjoy feeding her – the feeling of relaxation, of breathing out, which comes over me when we sit down together to feed is just incredible. Likewise, though, I love eating with her – watching her pick and choose between pieces of broccoli, or a baked bean, or some toast, with gusto and curiousity is both intensely rewarding and deeply entertaining, the latter particularly when she holds some foodstuff aloft, beaming out from underneath it as she waves it triumphantly above her head. I particularly like the earnestness with which she undertakes drinking – current favourites include pear juice, camomile tea and warm water. So, rationally, I am aware that this return to menstruation is all part of the natural cycle of life, and, as Quercus put it, it’s a part of what created the witchling in the first place. But I already miss the times when she was so tiny, when we moved as one, when we were so very linked as to be almost indistinguishable, and I ask quietly how it is that this tiny person is suddenly a curious, lively, independent-seeming child? How time flies when you’re having fun, eh?

- that it is raining, hard, on the one day in living memory (OK, slight exaggeration, but only slight) that I have access to a car, and, of course, the car is parked a mile away, down very wet and muddy lanes. Hello, soggy walk with baby in sling, and how are you today?

- that the blind I am making for the witchling’s room presents some sort of unusual challenge to the sewing machine, which has, in accordance with the unwritten Code of Sewing, decided that there are too many users connected to the central sewing knowledge database, and thus I must be disconnected, leaving only a plethora of unsightly, and utterly inexplicable, threads.

- that, despite her sixth tooth declaring its woe done and finally deigning to appear on Saturday, the witchling is still out of sorts in a seems-like-teething manner, on the day when Quercus is in London from nasty o’clock this morning until horrendous o’clock this evening, meaning a solo bath- and bed-time for me, on not much sleep, and with a bit of a headache.

- that, now that the broodiness has passed, at least one of the chickens has taken to Renegade Laying: Eggs on the Edge. Found one yesterday in the middle of a load of brambles. I swear they do it on purpose, just to mess with us.

- that, when moving a chair across the kitchen in a slightly lack-of-sleep befuddled manner, I put the leg of said chair through the front of the microwave door, meaning it is probably gently microwaving our entire house even as we speak.

- that, having spent approximately an ice age researching nappies and the various possibilities therein, it is conceivable that the witchling is allergic to latex (in the leg bindings of the waterproof wraps), which would explain why the bastard nappy rash Just Won’t Fuck Off.

In short, arse arse arse. Normal service resumes shortly.

Ages ago I mentioned the rather exciting beetroot experience that I’d had. Well, clearly, just mentioning that sort of thing is coyness beyond the coping powers of human endurance, so here is what that experience consisted of.

Chocolate Beetroot Cake
Get fists on…
8 oz sunflower oil (yes – the original recipe said butter, but hey – I’m all about the improvisation)
11 oz sugar
4 eggs
8 oz self-raising wholemeal flour
3 large tbsp cocoa
8 oz beetroot, cooked and grated (the original recipe asked for about double this; having tried it with what we happened to have, I’m glad I didn’t put more in, as I think it would have become a chocolate BEETROOT cake)
As much chocolate as you can justify (I used about 8 oz)
A slug of vanilla

Then…
Melt the chocolate over a gentle heat, with the butter and the sugar. I just slung the lot in a small pan and tried to employ what little self-restraint I have in both staying my hand from scooping the lot straight into my mouth and in turning the heat up full-blast to achieve lift-off that bit sooner; if you’re feeling capable as well as super-patient, you could bugger about with a bain marie if the fancy takes you. Let the resulting mix cool a bit, then beat in the eggs and the other bits and bats; again, if you’re super-patient and more Goody-Two-Shoes than me, you could even get out the sieve and do something other than look at the dried bits of rice on the edge of it before putting it back in the cupboard (what? that’s just me?). I grated the beets straight into the mix, which was tremendous fun, as well as being incredibly colourful. Give it all a good mix, and stick it in a loaf tin before whacking it in the oven at about 180°c for about forty minutes or so. Normal rules apply: it’s done when you can’t wait any longer a knife comes out clean; timings are always approximate because our oven is a big bag of shite.

Still to come: ‘Patchwork – When Colours Go Wrong’, and ‘Trousers on a Shoestring, or “How to chop up that shirt of Quercus’s that I’ve never liked”‘. (I bet WordPress is going to eat my quote marks for breakfast. Bastard template.)

Is it wrong to fall in love with a paint, d’you think? The red tester arrived two days ago. It is small. Innocuous, even. But only because of its size. Man, that is one RED paint. We are going to paint the lime wall – which is both the tallest wall, and the one you’ll actually see least of, as it’s going to have cupboards nearly covering it, and already has shelves on one side of the door – with it, and I cannot wait. The paint is breathable and doesn’t smell at all, which is slightly unnerving to one who knows the Way of Gloss (sounds like some Taoist thing, doesn’t it?), but rather pleasing. So far, I have, ahem, ‘tested’ the paint with a series of hearts in varying sizes, sprawled across the clean freshness of the wall with lavish abandon. Well, it’s important to see what it looks like in different lights. Ahem.

Oh, and Ms. LLama has started me off wanting dreadlocks again. I had a brief flirtation with dreads when I was about 22 – as my hair was very short at the time, it was, well, short-lived… A friend was learning to put fake dreads in people’s hair, and I volunteered as a guinea-pig. They looked fab for about a week, but then I gradually moulted. Not so great. Now, however, my hair is long enough, for the first time since I was about 14, to consider Actual, Proper Dreads. And yes, I am aware of the hideous predictability of it, particularly for those of you unfortunate enough to know me – and my tendencies of a hippy variety – in real life. So. To dread, or not to dread? I am slightly reassured on my one previous reservation – the frequency of washing which one could undertake – in that the lovely Sarah, herself the owner of a very fine set of dreads, reckons every two or three days works fine. Should have thought of this when I started my maternity leave, I suppose. Meh. No-one’s perfect, right?

1. Quercus’s mother has been here since last Thursday. For the most part, it has been OK – she has helped with bits and pieces of DIY, which means that we now have everything done in the extension bar the last remaining bits of plastering (we’re getting a plasterer for this, as our abilities with lime render are not matched by our abilities with cement-based stuff) and the fitting of skirting boards. Oh, and painting. And, er, making a kitchen. But, you know, getting there. Lots of gloss painting, lots of undercoating, lots of cleaning. Progress, in short.

2. The witchling is teething again. She’s got four teeth at the moment, and seems to be working hard at the arrival of number five. Lots of crying this morning which wasn’t very nice for either of us; fortunately, the sling still works wonders with her, as she very rarely cries when carried. 

3. Over the weekend we have clawed back a small piece of vaguely presentable garden so that the witchling can have some time outdoors without being bombarded by building-site nonsense. I am really quite pleased, not least as it gave me an excuse to dig out a couple of windchimes to hang in the tree. 

4. We are about to order some clay paint. Well, it might be clay paint, but it might be casein distemper; having spent days sorting out the lime render on what used to be an external cob wall, we’re keen to give it the right finish so that the wall can breath. It’s going to be red, whatever the finish, and eventually I shall paint a new spiral on the wall somewhere. I am looking forward to that day more than I can say. 

5. We have acquired a new magic board. When I was pregnant, Quercus had the rather touching idea of a board where I wrote things I wanted to do myself, but couldn’t, for one reason or another. He then came along and did said things, without saying anything, and wiped them from the list when they were done. It worked very well, and kept me sane about various bits and bobs that an increasingly large waistline made difficult. Now, it’s become a bit swisher – a dry-chalk pen, and a picture frame with a piece of black card behind it in order to create a wipeable surface – and has spawned a ‘We must…’ section, together with a ‘We need…’ bit. 

6. One of our hens is broody. Trout. We’re not in a position to make raising chicks sensible, and are thus spending a lot of time turfing her out of the nesting box. 

7. The witchling’s favourite meal appears to be sardines on toast. I have gone back to making bread lately, which is a genuine delight to me. Months of bought bread, no matter how nice, makes me realise anew how much I enjoy baking bread, and how grounding I find it. The kneading, the rising, the baking – there is a sort of rhythm to it which I find immensely reassuring, particularly when I do it just after the witchling has gone to sleep, and the house is still and gently dark. Better yet, the witchling seems to like my bread best. 

8. The witchling’s favourite activity is probably playing hide and seek, which she does at the table in her chair. I finished making a cushion for the chair on Thursday; it’s a wooden highchair with a sort of curved back, a little like a carver chair, and she likes to rock, which gave me conniptions because I thought she would bash her head, sooner or later, hence the cushion. (The irony is, at school, I loathed needlework and all such things, yet now I frequently make things, and the more I make, the more I enjoy it. I wonder if the people who were good at things like this when we were in classes together still make things, or does the universe move to ensure that only a select few can ever master the obscure art of sewing-machine-threading at any one time?) Anyway, she raises a tea-towel over her head, and grins out from underneath it, sometimes hiding, sometimes peering around one edge. It’s hard to say who has more fun – her or her audience. 

9. My favourite words at the moment: mama, dada, duck-duck. Bet you’d never guess why…!

10. The chard seeds I sowed last week have sprouted already. Soon, we shall have rainbow leaves again. The colours! The colours! 

First, a disclaimer – this post is ridiculous, because its form makes it something of a paradox. There isn’t much I can do about that, really, because I choose to use a blog as my method of writing this, but, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I am aware, very aware, of the ‘pot… meet kettle’ possibilities inherent.

So, here’s the thing: I have a very ambiguous relationship with things like Twitter and Facebook. I use both, but I do so largely out of boredom; if I’ve been particularly active on either, then you know it’s probably because I’ve got something large and dull on which I should be working (whether that’s housework, DIY in the extension, or freelance editty stuff [and yes, that is the correct professional term, thankyouverymuch]), or possibly because the world as we know it has ceased to exist, and I have run out of such things with which to occupy myself. Clearly that latter is deeply unlikely, but, well, one can dream, right? Anyway, the thing that irks me about things like Twitter and Facebook is that they seem to me to erode ‘proper’ social interaction. I know, I know: pretentious alert! sound the siren! But seriously – I actually mean it. And yes – I am a hypocrit for using them, then; being a hypocrit doesn’t mean I’m also wrong, though.

See, with Twitter, your status is a condensed 200-odd characters long – it’s all about the moment, the instant, what you’re doing at that precise second, and so, by its very nature, it’s out of date very quickly, and thus time to move on. In a way, I like that: you get snapshots of people’s lives that you otherwise wouldn’t have, which can be nice if you have friends in far-flung locations and you don’t get chance to see that daily-living-what-shall-I-have-on-my-sandwiches-style stuff. But if you’re anything like me, it can also mean that you spend a lot of little bursts of time updating your status. And your Facebook page. And maybe adding a link here, and a nudge there. And then you realise that if you added up all that time spent nudging, statusing, and generally buggering about in an utterly non-productive manner, you’ve probably got a good couple of hours that you didn’t think existed. And that’s where my gripe comes in. I have several good friends who use Facebook and Twitter religiously. It’s lovely to know what they’re up to, and I enjoy seeing pictures of their latest jaunts and whatnot, but I still miss actually connecting with them at a level which isn’t easily translated into one sentence. It’s funny to think of email as old-fashioned, but it seems that way, when you find you haven’t actually sat down and written a decent-length email to so-and-so for months, because it’s easier to just hit ‘post’ on someone’s wall, or @so-and-so on Twitter. There’s a loveliness about that instant connection, for sure, but there’s no sense of deeper communication. For me, there’s still something missing.

I’m thinking of deleting my Twitter account, for the second time. When I wrote as Kitchen Witch over at the now-newly-formed Journalspace, I used Twitter briefly, but the flirtation died because my PhD was in its death-throes and making one hell of a fuss about its impending completion; this time around, I think Twitter and I simply aren’t suited. I appear to be increasingly drawn, ironically for one who has been blogging for about five years, to the slower pace of actual conversation, of letter-writing, of parcel-sending. Perhaps it’s having a small person about the place; I am aware of those little eyes, saucer-like, watching that odd little white box that Mama is tap-tap-tappitty-tapping on, and I am conscious that, among the very few things that the witchling needs, my attention – undivided, amongst the chaos of daily chores, hens, DIY, proofreading and whatnot, for at least some of the time – is near the top of the list. When I have the most to do, my procrastination tendencies are at their strongest; Twitter and other Web 2.0 creatures offer easy distraction, but the penalty for me is a constant sense of failure, of having given in when I should simply have pulled my finger out and done whatever it is that I know I should really be doing.

[Of course, the other side of this is that I have been lucky enough to 'meet' people with whom I share a real sense of deep and abiding friendship. Ms. Llama and I met via the interweb in about 1998, and Ally and I have spent many a happy hour lusting after new breeds of chickens while discussing whether or not one could build a house out of Weetabix. We met up with HWz and his lovely family for a walk round Riverford Farm, home of all things box-scheme, back in October of last year, and he was once foolish enough to volunteer to help out with our extension, which couldn't have been built without the help of Lovely David. So, I'm aware of the contradictions in my feelings, but that doesn't make them go away!]

Summary: Where does the time go? Yesterday the witchling was 6lb 10 of tiny person, and now suddenly she sits on her own, picks up food with obvious glee (plum has now been supplanted in her affections by banana), and expresses opinions on the colour of a proposed outfit for the day. Oh, and she looks delicious.

Fun: Quercus is learning to love the baby rucksack, also known as a back-carry. He manages the witchling really well, slinging her like a pro and charging up hills, complete with brief gallop sessions when she pulls his hair; she loves this in particular, and chortles w ith glee as he jogs along.

Challenging: eBay is proving to be a bit frustrating about the car thing. The seller has now relisted the car, despite having opened an ‘unpaid item’ dispute with Quercus, in which he asks for the money. This goes against eBay policies, apparently, yet they haven’t pulled this new auction, which ends today. We’ve let them know about it, and Quercus has, as requested, emailed them the whole sorry story, but so far, nothing, nada, nil. I’m trying to be philosophical, but the number of times when We Are In The Right Yet It Makes No Difference still irks me.

Thoughtful: The aged parent’s visit was a mixed bag. Some good, some not-so. Good: he actually came and stayed for more than twenty-four hours, which is something of a record in recent times. Not-so: he was here for five days; three of those days, he disappeared for nearly all of the afternoon, leaving on a twenty-minute errand, only to return about four hours later, with no explanation. Our relationship continues to challenge, and sadden, me.

An insight: Having a long list of things to do doesn’t always make it easier to do them, and lists can create their own tyranny.

A website/blog: Cave Mother‘s thoughts on baby-wearing, co-sleeping and whatnot have entertained me in recent weeks; particularly like the idea of a cave baby.

Words: ‘Look! There’s a baby, covered in drool! Look! There’s a baby, whose daddy’s a fool!’ (It’s too easy to send up the simple rhymes of the original, ‘Look! There’s a Baby‘, I fear…)

Note to self: I need to get better at dividing my time. Either I’m Doing Something, or I’m Not. Stop half-doing things – you don’t pay proper attention to either strand, and it doesn’t feel like you’ve achieved anything, or had a decent spot of time off.

Favourite tip/idea from the web: this cake, or a close variation on it. I’ll post the recipe I ended up going with shortly.

Slice of home: Let us not speak of my appearance in this particular shot; suffice it to say that it was a Sunday morning, and I hadn’t, er, quite got myself together. (Editor’s note: that’s a complete lie, really – generally I look exactly like that, even when I have got myself together. It’s such a subjective term, ‘together’, isn’t it? Ahem.) Note also the complete bedlam in the backdrop; I always used to kid myself that when I lived in my own establishment, I would keep it clean and tidy ALL THE TIME, to make up for the permanent chaos my father creates just bythinking about entering a room. See? I even went for extra emphasis there. Just for added whatsit. Anyway, seems I was mistook – our extension, which is a subject for a whole ‘nother post, defeats even my neat-freak ambitions.

If you’re posting a month in review thingy, do let me know via the comments, particularly if your house is messier than mine.

With thanks to Mon for the format; Mon has a proper list thingy of people doing this, by the way, so drop in and say what-ho if you’ve a mo’.