Good god, someone appears to have flipped the summer switch. Today, glorious sunshine pours in through the window, and, what’s more, not for the first time this week. At this rate, the south-west will be populated once more by people who think it’s acceptable to go into shops without the presence of a t-shirt (she said, her protestant savagery gene coming to the fore after years in abeyance). (Abeyance. Isn’t that a fantastic word?)

Anyway, yes – it’s been about twenty-eight degrees here today, and really quite pleasant. A light breeze to stop it getting too sultry, and not a cloud to be seen.

Unless, that is, you count the metaphorical cloud of teething, which is an ever-present enemy at the moment. The witchling, who, until the last few days, has been motoring steadily towards sleeping an entire night without wanting either milk or cuddles (which, of course, I then proceed to miss, predictably), and who slept a ten-hour stretch solid several times in recent memory, is having a hard time of it with what appears to be her first molar. There is a white bump in her bottom gum, and thus, she is waking quite a bit more frequently, and wailing inconsolably, which is horrid for all concerned. She is also having trouble dropping off in the day, and staying asleep for more than forty minutes at a time is also presenting considerable difficulties for the poor infant. The result is that she’s tired pretty much all day at the moment, and her natural rhythm appears to have been completely submerged in teething tears. She’d been moving towards dropping her morning snooze for a little while, and now it appears that if she sleeps in the morning AT ALL, even for half an hour, that rules out any more sustained snoozing in the afternoon, which makes for the clichéd tears before bedtime (sometimes all round; we have just arrived at ‘going batshit’ as the best definition for maternal exhaustion that we can come up with).

So, we’re attempting to claw back some sense of a pattern to our days; the tiny daughter seems to thrive on knowing, roughly, what happens when, and I think the teething woes, together with this difference in her daily snoozing (which is probably all rolled up in with the teething, of course), is combining to leave her spread pretty thin. Today, she slept for about forty minutes in the day before her teeth woke her up (she has a particular cry which really wrings my heart; you can tell she’s in pain, and deeply indignant about finding herself awake), so rather than spending ages attempting to get her to sleep again, I grabbed a sling and took her for a walk in the broadleaf forest up the road from Earthenhouse. (Indeed, I say ‘the’; there are actually several within easy reach, I am lucky enough to be able to say – the witchling, and indeed both Quercus and I, love nothing so much as a walk through a beech wood, and there are hill forts a-plenty in this area which feed our appetite for such things amply.) There was much tickling around the edges of the sling (a mei tai, which leaves handy poking holes for parental torture of tiny people), much pointing at leaves and shrieking with laughter, and considerable quantities of amusement on both parts.

And then, just as we were getting quite warm and about ready for a nice sit-down and a cup of tea, there was sticky date loaf. And it went thusly:

Sticky Date Loaf

Get mits on:

2 cups of self-raising wholemeal flour

1 cup of brown sugar

A good sprinkle of crushed walnuts (I’ve also used sunflower seeds when the walnuts had run dry, or is that a mixed metaphor too far?)

About two cups of dates, boiled in about a cup of water until they’re soft

A large pinch of cinnamon, and, if you fancy it, a good handful of lemon zest

2 eggs

Then…

Stick the lot in a mixing bowl and stir it all up; you can either wait until the softened dates have cooled, or, if, like me you are far too impatient for such things, make sure you put the eggs in last in order to avoid sticky date loaf à la scrambled egg. Shove the resulting sticky goo into a loaf tin, pop it in the oven on about 180°c for about forty minutes, et voila – sticky loveliness which goes rather well with a spot of chai.