It’s been ages since I’ve had a working laptop, a spare half-hour, an internet connection, and the will to do something more active than staring at my navel for some time, but finally, that moment has arrived.

So, here is a quick round-up of the things we’ve been doing lately, which includes, of course, the small girl’s second birthday (June 1). I can’t believe my girl is two – it seems as if she has been a part – a defining characteristic – of my life always, yet at the same time, it’s but a blink of the eye since I was marvelling at the feel of her moving about inside me, watching the odd outline of, well, who knew what appearing against the side of my ever-expanding belly as she made herself that bit more comfortable.

We spent the week preceding her birthday at Quercus’s mother’s house, where the small girl enjoyed herself chasing about in a remarkably tidy garden while I sat beneath a copper beech tree and sewed things, including a dress (below) for the small girl made from dyed fabric we bought for table coverings at our wedding dance (I still have nearly a bolt of that fabric left) and various (slightly abortive) dresses for the doll I was making her for her birthday. (Ye gods, who knew that making dolls’ clothes would turn out to be such a dark art? I thought I was on the home strait when I managed to stitch on the doll’s head without putting it on back to front or something; let us not speak of the giant backside I created when I inadvertently over-stuffed the body section without realising that actually, all that spare fabric wasn’t spare, but was supposed to be the whole of the torso, not just the legs… Um…)

We arrived back in Devon, armed with a grandma who was going to help with both small person amusement and various delightful building-project-related tasks, to find that our absence had given Quercus the time to undercoat all the external woodwork, dig large trenches for drains to go around the outside of the house (we’re using this perforated pipe stuff which is supposed to take moisture away from the base of the cob walls; given that cob is just earth and straw, really, we don’t want to be adding too much water, as living in an earthen house is one thing, but no-one wants to live in a mud pie), fit guttering and downpipes to the extension, clean up the roof with a pressure washer (the lime got everywhere when we were rendering), re-hang the front door, sand it back to its original wooden state, fashion a small oak bed from the off-cuts left after building the kitchen cupboards for the small girl’s new doll AND clean the house virtually top to bottom. Many, many bonus points were awarded, needless to say.

Her birthday itself was wet, unfortunately, but we managed a nice little walk aboot, and there was much cake-eating (apple and vanilla, with lemon icing and two rather natty candles with little stars on them), present-opening and wrapping-paper-flinging. She is still getting used to having new things to play with; we tend to find that things are often put to one side for several weeks while one possession occupies pole position, and then later a regime shift takes place. Bluebell, the doll being tucked into Quercus’s oak bed here, has just come into her own after I caved and bought some gorgeous dolls’ clothes from the Bishopston Trading Company in Totnes (where I spent a very happy day ambling about with L-Q-S and her River Man, over from Ireland for a brief tour of various parts of England, including an as-usual lovely lunch in Willow, probably my favourite eatery ever); the clothes are exactly the right size, and are just as lovely as the full-size clothes the BTC churns out. Mostly, though, I am stupidly grateful that, for once, I bought something, and it just worked, and it didn’t need adjusting, replacing, returning or otherwise translating AT ALL. (Even if I have got just a slight hint of maternal guilt at not producing these things myself, all the while dandling the babe on one hip, weaving a few lentils into my own reusable sanitary towels and whistling the odd bar of all four parts of a Stravinsky string quartet).

Apart from this, the house is now once more a golden colour all over – part of the latest wave of Sorting Things Out included fixing the render caught by the hard frosts last January, and adding a coat of limewash. That coat needs to be wrapped in several more coats, and quite possibly hats, scarves, mittens and muffs, of limewash before we’ll be happy that it’s as weather-proof as it’s ever going to be, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. The tricky thing is that we need dryish weather for limewashing, but not of the baking hot August-like variety we’re experiencing at the moment. It was twenty-five degrees this morning by ten o’clock. I mean, that seems a tad on the hardcore side to me, but then it’s well-known that I’d probably be happier living somewhere where ice proved a viable building product. (Blame it on having fair skin; it’s hard to get enthusiastic about weather which requires either the donning of something nice and sun-proof, like, say, A WARDROBE, or the frequent and lavish application of substances which greatly resemble axle grease. Oh, fair skin – why? WHY, I ask? English Rose? My arse. My family has Swedish roots, but that hasn’t helped my sodding skin tone, any more than my father’s black hair and olive skin did. Weedy little genes he must have, that’s all I can say.)

So. There you go. And you?