Right now, I am:

• listening to Thievery Corporation’s latest offering and loving it

• wondering how the small girl will manage at her grandma’s for a few days; Quercus is driving her over as I write this, for her first solo stay. She’s excited – helped to pack her things and was literally bouncing with enthusiasm come departure time – and I so hope that carries her through any mama-orientated wobbles

• immensely grateful that we have this as an option; Quercus and I haven’t spent any time together on our own for the better part of three years, and while the odd evening out has been managed here and there, the notion of several days is simply unreal, even if those days will be filled with limewashing…

• inhaling the scent of a particularly lovely sort of Nag Champa incense picked up by the small girl in Firkins, a long-term favourite shop in Exeter

• watching the corn turn golden in the field behind the house; it really is summer, then, despite rumours to the contrary…

• thinking of the crafty things I can do in the next few days if the small girl is happy with her grandma – so far, the list includes a bag for her to take to playschool (she’s been going for a morning a week, and seems, with the odd wobble, to be enjoying it, which has been very good for maternal energy levels when she gets back…!), a small quilt for the impending baby, some more trousers for the small girl, whose legs are growingly ridiculously fast, it seems, and possibly the shortening of my Storchenwiege sling.

• marvelling at the notion – quite ridiculous! – that this baby is less than two weeks away, universe permitting.

And you?

I’ve sort of made my peace with the whole plastering situation – it helped that my midwife has lived through a cob renovation herself, and was thus able to see a downstairs bed as a boon in a homebirth situation! I’ve been maintaining my sanity in a variety of ways, many of which are utterly ludicrous, frankly. The first of them is probably watercolour lanterns, with which I have been obsessed ever since I first encountered them probably six months ago on the ol’ interweb. Some stonking examples can be seen here; some are star-shaped, some more traditionally rectangular, and some like little flat stars in which a candle sits, rather than being hidden from view. I haven’t tried the flatter ones yet; clearly they are next on the list.

I feel I ought to have more to say for myself, really, but last night the small girl woke up at 10.00 and 2.00; I went in both times, only to find the second time that twenty minutes later she was awake again, and I had just got comfortable (which, at 37.5 weeks pregnant, is no mean feat), and asking to come in with me, which I went with for the sake of sleeeeeeeeep and happy oblivion. But then an hour later, after fidgetting and changing sides and poking and prodding, she asked to go back to her bed. Only to do an encore of the twenty-minutes-later-just-getting-back-to-sleep ‘MAMAAAAAAAAAA!’ call-back. I am on my knees, I find, today, so words in a sensible order of arrangement are just not high on the list.

Rationally, I know that this sleep-deprived state will end (one way or another, she said darkly), but at the moment, I am finding it very hard to imagine why on earth I put myself in this situation, and how we’re going to get through the coming months without one or all of us in tears.

Oh, and the plasterer cried off again today. Apparently he’s coming on Wednesday. I have kind of gone back to just not thinking about it, really. If he comes, he comes. If he doesn’t, well, he doesn’t. I think it looks like this: another two coats of limewash on the small girl’s room, done over two days because of drying times, hotly followed by gloss painting the painted woodwork and waxing the rest. After that, possibly we’ll lay a carpet a friend has passed on to us, in her room at least. That takes us, hopefully, to just the other side of the weekend. As for our room, well, say another three days’ plastering to get the stairs, landing and our bedroom top-coated in lime, with another few days’ drying time after that, and then however many coats of limewash are needed to get it looking right. I have started lobbying to use breathable paint rather than limewash because paint would = two coats, while limewash, particularly where the ceiling on the stairs hasn’t been fully plastered but only patched, would probably mean at least seven, at a coat per day. At this stage, I don’t think I care if we have to buy paint which costs more than limewash would. I just want to finish this. See? There I was saying I’d reached peace with it (the first few paras were written yesterday evening), and all it takes is a crappy night’s sleep to have me back to the verge of black despair. Lightweight, me.

On the plus-side, we’ve got a car seat for the new baby, and we’ve ordered blinds for the kitchen where we’ll hopefully be meeting him or her.

I go, to a Portland Bill-flavoured rest, during which an insanely awake-seeming small girl will no doubt offer a helpful commentary on the whys and wherefores of life in a lighthouse, and I will pretend to sleep.

Today is not a good day, really. Well, in lots of ways it’s a lovely day – the sun is shining, there is washing drying on the line, and this morning the small girl and I made three different colours (orange, red and yellow, coloured with beets and turmeric) of play-dough courtesy of this recipe, and there is chocolate in the house, which is of course never a bad thing.

But ye gods, I am sick of living in a renovation project.

We’ve now been sleeping downstairs for about two months, I think. There’s less than a foot of space down the side of our bed, because the room is not large, and chunks of the ceiling of the room in which the small girl is sleeping are falling down, trailing the dust of centuries across the whole room and decorating everything with a lovely reminder that an earthen house is just that: made of earth. The whole house is dusty, and there is furniture in stupid places, not to mention the storage garage down the road that a neighbour has very kindly lent us for storing most of the things which would normally live in the book/sitting room (and of course, because the whole damn thing is taking longer than I thought, I’ve now run out of distracty-knitting wool because it’s all stored in said garage, under half a ton of other crap).

More than that, Quercus and I are still having to operate on a divide-and-conquer footing, which means he’s either at work, working on the house or asleep, and I am either looking after the small girl, going to a chiropractor appointment or trying to sleep. And STILL we’re nowhere near done. The plasterer took ages to do the first coat on our newly-lathed ceiling, after Quercus and some very kind friends bust a gut to get the preparation done in time for him. THEN the lime took MUCH longer to dry than we’d hoped, partly because June was so rubbish in weather terms. And now he can’t come back for TWO WEEKS, even though the plaster is ready to be overcoated, because he has friends coming to visit. TWO WEEKS. I am due to have this baby in FIVE WEEKS. We have two coats of lime to go on both our bedroom and the landing/stairs. We have three coats of limewash which needs doing after that, and then the normal moving furniture/cleaning/carpet reinstating shenanigans. FIVE WEEKS.

I just wanted a bit of July to be just us, the three of us. To have some time to ourselves, in our newly-sorted bedrooms. To maybe, I don’t know, go out to the sea or something, and have some tea somewhere. To get some rest. To organise things ready for our new baby.

Instead, Quercus is taking unpaid leave from work, making our already-tight budget even tighter, so that he can work pretty much non-stop on the house, and it still looks pretty unlikely that we’re going to finish in time.

I’m a bit fed up.