(Warning: self-pitying ramble followeth, of the sort which may just warrant a kick up the backside.)

So, I’m doing a bit shittily at the moment, hence, in part, the quietness hereabouts. The small girl and I returned home about ten days ago, and I was just. so. pleased to get back. We’d spent a rather hectic week staying with Quercus’s mother, which, in theory, should have been fine, but when you throw into an already sometimes-challenging mix, more nightly wakings than I can remember coupled with house-sitting for friends with two very boisterous dogs, oh, and some extra-clingy toddler moments for good fun, basically chaos ensues. I spent the week ferrying the small girl between the two houses we were sort of inhabiting, and worrying about the state of the roof, and not really doing much else, except wishing I could get more sleep.

And then I came back, and sort of breathed out. The small girl went back to sleeping much more dependably; I had had this very strong sense for the entire time that we were away that all she really needed was to be back home, in her own place, surrounded by her (albeit rather dusty) own things, and it seemed like that was the right instinct. Most of this last week has seen her much happier, although the last few days have been a bit interesting as the Aged Parent was visiting, and, well, he has that effect on people. (For the most part his visit was fine, if brief; having not been here since September, he was polite about the changes that have taken part since then – garden, the creation thereof; ceilings, the removal thereof, etc. – but he doesn’t really get the small girl, so that she’ll be attempting to engage him in conversation – and her articulation is pretty damn clear – and he doesn’t even notice, and will instead start talking to one of the adults present, meaning that she gets a bit frustrated when it seems to her that he is interrupting her and so on. Basically I think she likes him well enough (though there was an entertaining morning question: ‘is that strange man coming back today?’), but doesn’t really connect with him; I have yet to decide for whom this is more sad, but I think on balance it’s probably for him.

The bummer of it is that I still feel that what she really needs is a sense of equilibrium, and we are about to depart the parish again for another week. I feel as if I’m doing a pretty rubbish job of life at the moment, truth be told. This whole pregnancy malarky isn’t overly fun for the small girl, methinks. The SPD symptoms are still far from ideal; it’s not as bad as it could be, but I’d say it’s fair to say that I’m in pain more often than I’m not, and that makes me both irritable (predictably), tired (probably because I’m not sleeping well, and that’s probably in turn because I’m not able to get as much exercise as I would like) and a bit self-pitying, not because of the pain but because I feel that I’m giving the small girl such a rubbish deal at the moment. She thrives on plenty of fresh air and Things To Do, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and just sit there, emerging from time to time to read the internet and give her a cuddle. These are not life visions which match terribly well, you see? I just wish I could take her out for a walk, stick her in the sling when she gets tired, and Do All The Things We Normally Do. For both our sakes, really.

I’m also crosser than I’d like to be. This morning I was That Parent Who Shouts. I am very, very rarely That Parent Who Shouts. Particularly when it’s not really for a reason other than the normal frustrations or challenges of dealing with someone who is not yet three. I just lost my rag, really, and despite knowing rationally that the very thing which will make her less likely to help put on her shoes, or find her coat, or walk in the direction which would be useful is shouting or being generally irritable, off I went, to the extent that Quercus intervened and took her out instead, while I went back to bed and slept. I hate feeling so emotionally unstable – tears before breakfast seems to me to be taking things a bit far, really, yet the last few weeks have seen that happening more often than I’d like, and it’s me with the waterworks, not her. She even picks flowers to cheer me up. And that, of course, makes me feel like an absolute sod.

This Thursday I am due to go back to work, after three weeks off. My GP, together with the occupational health advisor I’ve seen at work, thought that if the SPD didn’t settle down with three weeks’ worth of resting and whatnot, then it’s probably not going to (not hugely surprising, I know). Of course, some days it’s better than others, but some days it’s pretty crap. I’m going to see a McTimoney chiropracter at the end of the month, in hope that that might cheer my bloody pelvis the fuck up. In the meantime, I have to decide what to do about work. I have the offer from my GP of a certificate that would see me off work on sick leave until four weeks prior to my due date (the first week of August), at which point my maternity leave would kick in automatically. This is another thing about which I feel crap, obviously – insert maternal guilt at this point about not being able to just manage everything perfectly while still producing reams of creative writing and the odd sponge cake to boot. I wanted to work until the middle of July, and I wanted – and indeed still want – to be one of those people for whom pregnancy is a time of flowering, of ripening, of blooming. Instead, I am a ranting madwoman, prone to snapping and tearful raving, whose kitchen ranges from pristine (after moments of ‘I will now proceed to get a grip’) to disastrous, and whose moods seem to follow suit. It’s just a total bore.

And the irony is that I like being pregnant. Which seems to go against all the above, really, doesn’t it, but still, it’s true. I love the feel of this baby moving about, booting me cheerfully in the ribs on a nightly footing (ha – I can still pun, even on hormone nutjob status). I just don’t like the attendant chaos. I suppose this is what happens when you start to adopt the ‘there is no ideal time’ approach. This certainly isn’t an ideal time in lots of ways, but then again, I don’t imagine that if we’d waited, such a time would have presented itself.

So, I am trying to start over.

Tomorrow, I will pack the list of things I’ve just jotted in my notepad, and head over to Sussex with the small girl. I have a list of seven craft things we could do while there, and I have seven trips or potters which we might undertake, weather and mood permitting. I am taking this time to remind myself that reading books to a small girl is far better than simply sitting there, head in hands, wondering what on earth to do with ourselves. I am taking knitting, because clearly to be knitting is better than not to be, and I think half my trouble at the moment is that tiredness which comes also from the boredom of not being as physically active as I would like. My brain, you see, runs amok, and not in a happy way; perhaps the clicketty-click of the knitting needle will still its insistent tattoo. I am taking pencils, and felting things, and books. Perhaps being offline will be good for me; certainly when I’m feeling low, my internet time is apt to increase, which doesn’t seem like a helpful thing to do, really.

Anyway, we shall see.

Enough of the shittery. How are you doing, reader dear?

Right now I am:

• listening to the hum of the oven as dinner approaches

• watching Quercus move rhubarb into its new home IN THE GARDEN! Did I mention that we have a garden now?

• marvelling at the dust created by renovation work

• wondering if there is such a thing as a decent vacuum cleaner, or if the common denominator, rather than their shittery, is us

• weighing up the pros and cons of stopping work at twenty-eight weeks pregnant (which is a whole nother post in itself, I suppose, but the long and short = SPD – the git which keeps giving)

• throwing my hat up at a night without the small girl waking, after about a month of trotting between rooms several times each night

• loving the emergence of the upstairs of our house from years of neglect, cobwebs, loose thatch and all

• looking forward to freezing meals in our new chest freezer, which liveth in the workshop, for when the new baby arrives

• thanking the universe that I have Quercus, whose capability and enthusiasm never cease to amaze me.

And you?

Hello. Quercus here, hijacking for a short while. It’s been a hell of a day, and one in which the bad has happened, I believe, in order to offset the good!

The bad. Earthenwitch managed to pilot her vehicle rather too close to someone’s shiny great Merc in a supermarket car park; in fact, she piloted it not just close to it, but actually into it. Oh dear. Fortunately the woman was as nice about it as one could be, but it’s still a complete bummer. Also, the Witchling has been giving it some stick today in the usual 2 year-old ways, namely through the unnecessarily prolonged misuse of both lungs and bladder.

However…

The good. The roof is not going to fall down after all! The previous post from Earthenwitch did not, I feel, fully express the rather dire situation we found ourselves in earlier in the week. In fact, I must admit to having played it down rather to my really quite pregnant wife at the time, in order to aid her in keeping what little sanity she still possesses, while inwardly going “shitshitshitshitshitshitshit”.

The roof, it was bad. Very bad. Our abode is not a whacking great farmhouse, coming with jolly 9″ X 9″ chunks of oak in the roof, ready to last a millenium. Rather, it is a peasant’s cottage built with materials from the garden and surrounding fields and hedgerows. Consequently, the timbers used in the construction of the roof are considerably less solid than I would choose to use for the construction of, for instance, a largeish shed. They are poles cut from small trees – round, roughly straight pieces of ash no more than 10′ long and at the absolute largest 4″ in diameter; about the same as a man’s hand. Some are under 2″ – more like a broom handle than anything. These are heavily woodwormed, and really quite bowed and bent from hundreds of years of carrying the weight of the thatch above. In places some have broken in two, leaving the thatch to fall down, and in other places they have become too short when the back wall of the house moved back half a foot at the top, and have been fixed simply by nailing some very small timbers onto them.

Worst of all was the broken A frame. There are two of these in the roof, and the one at the end where I took down the ceiling last week looked like this. Side the first:

Screwed, right? And T’other side:

Really quite buggered where it joins the purlin, I think you’ll agree? Replacement was out of the question, as to do so would mean taking the thatch off, so reinforcement was the order of the day. With the arrival of Samwise the Builder, a highly capable young chap who is trying to get his own construction company off the ground, it went something like this… A cunning larch arch was fastened to next to the old timbers. The angle is lower due to the position of the purlins, which transferred weight to the old timbers and caused them to fail:

The larch will end up being clad in something prettier. Then a tie was added. You can see one end of it here – this will show when the room is finished, so I chose an old piece of 6″ X 3″ pine which I rescued along with several trailer-loads of other roof timbers from an old house in a nearby town. Note that the old, white-painted tie-beam has been knocked out, and the new-old pine beam is much higher (6′ 6″ from the floor):

Then we reinforced the diagonals along the hipped end of the roof. You can see the join here. These timbers will show too in between the plasterwork. Not a great photo, but it’ll end up looking a bit tent-like in a kind of structural way. The diagonal timbers will get chocked out to support some of the older timbers higher up at this end:

The other side of the roof, away from the hipped end, will also get padded out with some new(ish) timbers, so there will possibly be more exposed woodwork in the rest of the room. The end result will be a room with a much higher (vaulted) ceiling, which is structurally sound and rather nicer to look at than what was there before.

Other than that, today has seen some stripping in the landing (hello ladies!) and a bit of belt sanding on the Witchling’s door.

And now I’m off to eat curry.

This morning Quercus took down the ceiling in our bedroom. It’s been gradually descending ever since we moved here in 2005, and we have always known that a good portion of the original house would need replastering at some point; given our impending arrival in August, now seems like a good time to stop large chunks of plasterwork falling down on one’s head… So…

You can probably just make out the rather haphazard nature of the beams – most of them are roundwood poles of a not-very-large diameter, and several of the ones designed to keep the thatch up have either disintegrated at some point, or simply come away from their proper place, meaning that the thatch has fallen in in places. Not so that you can tell from the outside, but obviously rather more than one would like. This means that quite a lot of new timber will be needed for the ceiling; some to reinforce the existing bits, and some to replace those which have just…. disappeared. Bracing is the way forward, methinks. It’s amazing, looking at pieces of wood which may quite probably have been up in that ceiling for really rather a long time; back when we fitted the stove, I felt definite shivers when we found fingerprints in the cob, fingerprints probably made by the people who built this house originally, back some time in the seventeenth century – well, the ceiling has probably had work done on it since then, but the original timbers are almost certainly just that: original.

We’re revisiting the concept of the family bed, too. Largely because the room we’ve shoe-horned our bed into while our bedroom is out of use is, well, about the size of said bed. There is a gap of six inches to one side, and enough room to walk past the end, and that’s about it (along with the mankiest door in the house; it fell of its hinges about two years ago, and we’ve just kept it propped open ever since, flat against the wall; I’d show you what the wall looked like behind said door if I didn’t like you so much). So, so far, our bed has been a sleeping space (for us, for the small girl, for – if they get their way – both our cats), a play area (for beads, buttons, wooden badgers, foxes, and reindeer), a picnic ground and a cinema (for me, while Quercus’s mum takes the small girl for a much-needed run around the field).

I think we’re looking at at least six weeks of sleeping downstairs. We’ve yet to move the small girl out of her room, largely because she and I are going to stay with Quercus’s mum for a few days shortly, and it seems daft to move her for a few nights. Hopefully now that the ceiling is down in our room, the rest of the preparation will be less scary; it’s mainly wall-paper stripping and then a cunning substance applied over the top to prepare the walls for a skimming of lime plaster wherever we can salvage the exisitng plasterowrk, and repairing the bits that we can’t. (Of course, I use ‘we’ here in the loosest possible sense; I shall mostly be gestating and hashing out the best way to make the small girl a felted play-scene farm mat creation for her forthcoming third birthday.)

It’s funny, but after so long spent agonising about when to do this work, and how to do it, and whether or not to do it before the baby arrives in August, it feels really good – even down to the sleeping downstairs chaos – to just get the buggery on with it.