- A new sewing machine has meant little time online other than that spent lusting after various different fabrics. (Why hello, velveteen!)

- Sleep continues to be a bit of a sod at our house at the moment; I’m trying to persuade Mirth to cut back on the ol’ night feeds (four or five times a night really does seem a bit much, given that she is really not fading away), and will see if this helps at all.

- It’s sunny. Everything is better when the sun shines.

- Time spent with friends out of the house, Mirth asleep in the sling, Hero exploring new places and new people, is very, very good for the soul. Even if some of those places are the hell that is soft-play areas.

- Nappies – well, nappies. I may have misjudged you, my little cotton friends. Since changing detergents and starting a new wipes lotion (Dr. Bronner’s, heavily diluted, with some calendula oil), miraculous days of non-sore bottoms have appeared. Long may they last; I am truly delighted.

- Less delightful is the notion of my maternity leave coming to an end. Mirth is eight months old; I have already had a letter asking if my provisional date of return (end of June) is one to which I intend to keep. The short answer: no. I will drag it out until after her birthday, I hope. More angsting anon, doubtless.

- Horrid sums of money about to be spent on wood-fired central heating, which, once it’s installed, we should be able to run for free.

- Which means that the house will be crawling with people running pipes in the cob (Quercus might well be doing this sort of stuff, though, as it makes the whole thing less expensive overall) and making loud noises (something Quercus excels at, mostly, anyway), so the childer and I will be off to pastures new for a few weeks while that all goes on.

- Except this weekend. When I get two days to myself, with just Mirth for company, while the forward guard goes to Quercus’s mum’s house, leaving me to sort through our attic contents in a bid to simplify the sheer quantity of stuff we appear to have up there. Some to sell, some for charity shops, some back in.

Spring is in the air, folks. And it feels nice.

Around here, Monday mornings are a fairly laid-back time of the week. After the usual mania of the weekend, the day starts with a reasonably quiet breakfast, and Quercus taking Hero to playschool for the morning. Sometimes he goes into work (as he has today; he’s trying to do a bit of extra time here and there so that when we finally, finally work out what to do about the central heating – or lack thereof – in this house, he can take time to do renovation stuff), and sometimes he’s at home, either pottering or doing Big Housework. So, today, I find myself at home with just Mirth and the cats for company. Mirth is gurgling to herself, trying to decide whether or not to kick up at the suggestion that she have a snooze; one cat is blinking slowly in the March sunshine; another cat has disappeared into the garden so effectively as to make one question whether or not she was ever here in the first place.

I tidy the kitchen after breakfast, sweeping the baby-led-weaning-strewn floor and putting some washing on. (I love the sound of the washer, quietly working away; it makes me feel productive even if I am sitting on my arse doing sweet fuck-all.) I wrangle wet washing into a bag, and contemplate hanging it out. Another bright day is promised; certainly it’s sunshine and horse-tail clouds out there at the moment.

I ponder what to do this afternoon, after walking down to collect Hero. Yesterday was spent at the beach in North Cornwall; an hour and a bit’s hop down the dual carriageway takes us to Trebarwith Strand, a beautifully Atlantic beach with huge breakers and small rock pools just right for a day’s pottering. There is sand in the bottom of the trug which holds the chaos of our regularly-worn shoes. We all have slightly pink noses, and Hero already has a generous sprinkling of freckles. Today, I decide, is a sandpit day, which may even mean I get to do some more seed-planting in the greenhouse while Mirth rolls about on the grass and Hero chases about with Wixon in between making sand cakes and leaf casseroles. I also intend to order a Kombucha scoby today, having read lots about how great this can be for all sorts of things, including eczema, my current lack-of-sleep-exacerbated irritant. (Experiences, anyone? Recipes? Recommendations?)

What’s today in your neck of the woods?

This weekend’s plans are mainly keeping-head-above-water things. The fridge is empty; the cupboards reasonably likewise. Unless we are to travel some rather unusual edible territory in the coming days, one of us must make the ultimate sacrifice and go grocery-shopping AT THE WEEKEND, which, as we all know, is utterly unspeakable. We also have the motherlode of washing to rehome, and a week’s worth of clothes to catch up on after our new-to-us-and-thus-fortunately-under-warranty washer decided to die last week, so that should pass at least some of the time in typically mind-numbing fashion. On top of that, the various boring and complicated and expensive factors of our would-be wood-fired central heating system continue to exercise us as we found this week that a friend’s tank, literally going begging, will not do what is needed, meaning we’re back to the drawing board, and the drawing board looks at the moment to cost something like £1500. Oh, the deep, deep joy that is adult life. Do you ever feel like you could just cheerfully kill in order to go back to being responsibility-free? To have days where you could just do exactly as you like? Without thinking about other people, or money, or time, or schedules, or menus, or housework, or really anything except pretty colours, knitting and possibly seeds? Hmm. I do. Hiding that well, non? (See earlier rambling rants about lack of sleep for the obvious cause of all this, obviously.)

It’s 10.42 and I am sitting in the kitchen in my pyjamas. Well, sort of. I have a black furry fleece jacket on too, which, in my book, means I am very nearly dressed; hey – what’s a pair of owl pyjamas between friends? I have consumed my own body weight in tea, and am trying to summon the gumption to do, well, anything other than sitting here procrastinating. It was not a brilliant night. Not the worst I’ve ever had, but still, I was awake more than I was asleep, and Mirth was unhappy more than she was asleep, which isn’t a good combination, really. I am trying to set my sights realistically low for this weekend; I know that the batshit mother who shouts and indulges in ranty-ranty-rants is just about at the top of the path, and that much more of this will have her through that door like a rat down a drainpipe. So, I am thinking that just keeping the house tidy, and making sure we eat, and maybe getting out for a walk is about the most I should aim for. That and some quiet time without any company. I do find I need time alone these days; well, I think I always have needed that time, but it’s only in recent years that it’s become hard enough to engineer that I’ve noticed its absence, if that makes sense. Yesterday afternoon, I collected Hero from pre-school and we walked the mile or so back home. I took Mirth upstairs to our room for her afternoon sleep, and came down, fully prepared to do something entertaining and stimulating with Hero while Mirth slept, only to find that she wanted to spend time in the garden with Wixon, our insanely furry older cat. That time turned out to be over an hour and a half, spent mostly charging about with Wixon following because of a tantalising piece of string dangled just out of reach. This in turn meant that I cooked dinner, tidied the kitchen, lusted after some Noro yarn online and sorted washing out in the relative peace and tranquillity of solitude. (Well, there may have been US TV on courtesy of internet streaming when I knew Hero wasn’t about to come in, but that is another story…) It did me a lot of good; I hadn’t realised how much I was daunted by the afternoon until it was over, and hadn’t been the hard slog I’d anticipated when I woke in the morning, knackered after a night of up-and-down-and-round-the-houses with Mirth. Sometimes being a mother feels like the only reason I exist, in the best of ways – I look at my children and simply can’t believe that I have been this lucky not once but twice, and my heart feels so full that the only expression it can possibly offer of this immense love I hold for them is the spontaneous appearance of tears, silent and joyful, rolling down my face as I smile at whichever child I am holding. But then there is the counterpart to that, when everything feels like the hardest work possible, the highest hill to climb, the sharpest learning curve to master. What I am coming to realise is that the truthfulness of these states is not mutually exclusive; rather, it seems to me that motherhood is both the hardest and best work that I can do.

This wasn’t supposed to be about all this at all, you know, but for some reason my emotions seem to be running very high at the moment, and I keep thinking about motherhood, and my own mother, and how things are going for us. It’s hard work, isn’t it, life, sometimes. But good work. Yes. Good.

Having been back in Devon for over a week, I’d hoped that I’d manage, say, a post every couple of days – when I have no opportunity, the words are there, just waiting to be written, and giving me a constant sense of having almost forgotten to do something quite important. Yet predictably when I have a laptop within easy reach, the planets align in such a manner as to make time spent online a bit of a rarity, and time spent online with a fully engaged brain? Virtually non-existent. So, despite having various things I’d like to write about, if only to get them out of my head, I have managed… well, nil.

Things are coming along here. Quercus has spent this week back at his desk-job (though at the moment his working week consists of a nearly-nine-to-five day for only three days a week) while we waited to hear back from electricians and heating engineers, and while we sorted out some practical things like sourcing wall lights which didn’t make us physically cringe, and finding curtain poles and rings and whatnot which didn’t require the loss of a major organ or a limb normally used for, say, walking. We are living in the kitchen, and thanking our lucky stars every day that a) we managed to finish the extension before we did this phase of work, so that we have a nice kitchen and a nice bathroom, and b) the weather is getting milder as each day passes and the world turns, bringing spring ever nearer and the fine weather which will mean the garden feels like another room of our house.

Talking of, Hero and I spent a pleasant hour or so planting seeds for this year’s veggie garden (butternut squash, tomatoes, parsley, basil, chard and beets so far, with the plan being that we’ll try for pumpkins, courgettes, sprouts, cabbages [the gorgeous January King], spinach, kale and a few other winter bits and bats later in the year) and clearing out the greenhouse (how is it that we leave it alone for much of the year only to find it’s a complete state whenever we return to it? How does that happen? Is there some sort of greenhouse-related goblin out there that we’ve never yet caught sight of?), and somehow we’ve acquired a third – yes, third! – lawnmower, free at the side of the road, which Quercus reckons will be good once fixed up (it’s petrol, and has a metal deck, which is apparently all-important in such things). The garden is coming alive, with birds happy to eat the food Hero puts out a few times a week, and cats lounging in the shade of unexpectedly warm March sun.

It looks as if I will take myself and the childer off to Sussex again later this week; I view this with a mixture of enthusiasm because it means more progress, and reluctance because it involves more driving than I’d like, and of course time away from both home and Quercus, which is never easy. My sleep trials continue; Mirth is currently going off to sleep easily and quickly for naps in the day, and at bedtime, but she wakes probably four times a night, with one of those wakings tending to take well over an hour of intermittent wailing and me upping-and-downing in a bid to get her back to sleep. She is also waking for the day before six, which is challenging me, frankly. Fortunately, Hero is sleeping well these days, which is just as well, given my comatose state for much of the day. I am in that hinterland of half-waking, half-sleeping which I know so well from the time when Hero was little, and which I like so little. Some days, if I’m honest, it feels as if the lack of sleep is just ruining my life; other days, most days, I am more realistic about it – it will pass; it is what it is; I can at least content myself with the knowledge that I am not going against my principles in my handling of night-wakings, and that so far, I am handling it with less frustration than I felt with Hero. But – realistically – something does need to change. I do not like myself when all I am managing is short daytime sleeps taken when Mirth sleeps in a frantic bid to catch up on the lost hours of the night; I am snappy, short-tempered, frustrated, lethargic. Rightly or wrongly, I set myself higher standards than the achievement of a relatively clean house, a fed-and-watered child, a vague notion of where we are in the cycle of grocery shopping, washing and tidying. To feel happy, to feel myself, to feel sane I need also to achieve a few things for myself, even if they are for other people ultimately – as such, knitting, whether it’s a cardigan for Hero or a shawl for myself (the latter being the current project), ticks the box, as does writing, as does anything creative, really. I just need that sort of thing to get through the difficulties of the continual night-waking without losing all sight of who I am, without dwindling to a mater-automaton who walks through the days with a mouth snarling into a growl and a continual sense of both ‘poor me’ and ‘evil you’. I must be more than that; I just must, and not least for the poor sods who have to live with me. (All I can say is thank all that’s holy for lactational amenorrhea. Just imagine this + PMS – hoo boy!)

It is not, after all, Quercus’s fault that he can’t feed Mirth in the middle of the night, any more than it is Mirth’s fault that, despite not exactly fading away at about twenty pounds at nearly seven months, she isn’t ready to stop feeding at night. Nor is it her fault that my impatience to get back to a slight pattern at night, to a little more sleep than this, is partly due to the three and a bit years of continually disrupted nights which preceded her birth. So, today, I breathe out again, and I try to accept that tonight will be the same, and probably tomorrow night, and probably the night after. I try to set aside my worries about how I will manage this little sleep when I have to go back to my desk job (which will still be part-time, and won’t be until August, despite my early-start fretting). I try to think of the chaos and disruption of a small house crawling with dust, electricians, heating engineers and building supplies mixed in with the usual detritrus of small children – a kitchen rug covered in small, bare-foot-hurting wooden animals, an always-overflowing washing basket, a table sticky with… something… – as a necessary part of the overall project. And above all, I try to remember to be grateful for all this. That we asked this heady mixture into our lives. That, for the most part, it is a good mixture, and we love it, and we are lucky, lucky, lucky to be able to do so much of what we do.

And for today, that is all.

So, the small people and I have returned from Sussex to the mid-work chaos of home. Oh, home! It is so very lovely to be surrounded by one’s own things, by one’s own people, by one’s own landscape. And, of course, one’s own dust, and one’s own falling-down-bits-of-wood, and one’s own power tools. Ahem.

Things are coming along nicely. Quercus has buggered about with the woodwork between the sitting room and what used to be our dining room; we have shelves, and pieces of wood to support the first floor, as in pieces which actually touch the floor as well as the ceiling… which makes a pleasant change from what was there previously, it transpires – !

So, my day has been full of mopping super-dusty floors, cleaning super-dusty surfaces and generally unpacking the things we brought back from Sussex. Tomorrow I hope I’ll finish sorting through the things, and gradually we’re moving towards the next bit of this work – we have an electrician booked! and a heating engineer! – which will probably see me taking the children away again for another few weeks. I find this harder than I’d expected, in the unexpected ways – I can cope with the night wakings and the early-morning starts, and I can cope with always being on duty, but I so miss having an adult to talk to who doesn’t just take the opposing view for the sake of it, and I really miss just the friendship of my husband, perhaps a tad pathetically. Also, being a bit of a home-creature, I also miss having my own space, albeit a tiny chaotic one, just to be in. But I’m aware that we’re really very lucky to have somewhere that I can go for extended periods like this, complete with howling-first-thing-and-leaping-on-your-head Hero and middle-of-the-night-wailing-for-ages-and-ages-and-ages Mirth, and for that I am super-thankful, frankly.

My head doesn’t appear to have anything more useful or interesting to say than that tonight; I think the short rations of sleep that I’ve been existing on over the last three weeks, together with a lot of practical decisions to be made and research to be done while we’re back here, have turned my brain to mush. So, tell me, dear reader, what you have been doing, and what tomorrow will bring you, and let me pass you a virtual cup of hot chocolate while we catch up on such doings.

Monday will see me making the trip to West Sussex with the two little people for the first time. While Hero has spent lots of time at her grandma’s, this is Mirth’s maiden voyage; I am viewing it with an equal mix of enthusiasm and nervousness, given that Mirth is not a big fan of car travel. It will be nice to be somewhere different for a little while – away from all the things that need doing here, I shall simply not think about mould or dust or chaos! – but I am a feeling a bit shifty about the impending nights… Mirth is very, very far from sleeping through the night at the moment, and I’m finding the sleep deprivation predictably challenging. She has two teeth, mind you, as of about three weeks ago, and appears to be doing her damnedest to provide numbers three and four forthwith; this, combined with the rumoured six-month growth-spurt means that she has been a pretty unhappy little plum in the dark of the night. Hopefully, this too shall pass; hopefully, it’ll pass a bit bloody faster than it did last time…! She is clearly keen to catch her sister up – sitting on her own reasonably happily, reaching for things all the time, muttering ‘Mama’ to herself as of about a week ago, and working on ‘Dadda’ too.

Anyway. A bright sunny day in Devon; cold, but gloriously fresh, with clouds stretched thin across a cerulean sky. Quercus, Hero and I are packing up the house. So far, we have books shoved into boxes, and most of the sort of detritus of normal life is following suit. Our living room and what’s now known as the room between (our old dining room) will be out of action for probably two months, I should think; we’ll be restricted to the kitchen, the bathroom and the bedrooms, but at least we’re lucky enough to have a large kitchen with space to beetle about like a mad thing (Hero), to kick and explore (Mirth), and to eat, take care of, read, knit and just be (Quercus and me, given time). So, two weeks away initially, so that Quercus can demolish ceilings and strip ancient wallpaper (vinyl) and plaster from the cob, and then we will regroup to form the next plan. Hopefully, I won’t be away for the entire duration of the work, but posting here will be even more sporadic than it has been of late, I fear.

I haven’t managed to get to grips with my waffle iron Chrimbly present yet, either, and I fear now that it may be some time before I do. It sits by the stove, awaiting another try; the first time, I think I hadn’t got it quite hot enough, but I have high hopes that next time I’ll crack it. Just need the winter to stay around long enough for us to get back from Sussex and be able to use the room where the stove is again… It’s in the sitting room, and that will probably be out of action for a loooong time as lighting it with lime plaster going off would not result in good things. Of course the sod of this is that the whole house will be noticeably colder; we have a heater in the kitchen but nothing in the bedrooms, so I view this proposition with a less than enthusiastic sentiment. Did I whinge on about central heating? I think not. The plan is that we are going to fit wood-fired central heating, run off a back boiler on the stove, with a thing called an accumulator tank, which should mean that it’s not just a question of stove lit = warm, stove not lit = cold. Now that I type this, it seems oddly familiar. Clearly I am losing my mind in one way or another; either I’ve written about this earlier or I simply think that I have. Ahem.

In the meantime, here are some things of wintry warmth, while the winter weather persists. First, I finished Hero’s cardigan, a rather splendid hue of purple in a pleasingly quick super-chunky wool. Then I discovered rice pudding. Oh, rice pudding. Where have you been all my life? Anyway, here is the recipe I have come to.

Spiced Rice Pudden

Wossinit?
About a mug of pudding rice
Somewhere between a pint and a pint and a half of goats’ milk (obviously ordinary, soya or rice would work just as well)
Cinnamon
Dark brown sugar
Coconut cream (I used a sachet of the Patak’s variety, but have also tried a half-carton too)
Cardamom pods
Lemon zest
Ground allspice

Then…
Sling it all in a nice thick-bottomed pan, and cook it as gently as your impatience will permit, poking it suspiciously until inspiration strikes, at which point sling in some dried fruit of some variety (we’ve had cranberries, mixed dried fruit and apricots so far) and continue to poke. Pop a lid on, checking back from time to time to ensure no calamity has occurred, and as soon as everything looks nicely squishous, scoff it down with a cup of cocoa.

Right. Off I go, to continue packing up the rooms next under attack. It feels oddly nostalgia-inducing, this process; we have lived in this house for six years with things pretty much as they were when we moved in (at least in the case of these last two rooms), and while I will not be sorry to bid the mould and the horrible, horrible carpet goodbye, I can’t help but think of the time when we first moved here: so much has happened since then that our selves as we were then seem almost to be another incarnation. Hmm. Must not get sidetracked, particularly in self-indulgent melancholia, so wish me luck (and spiders).

We have been making rather a lot of window thingies. Well, technically, I have been folding things like a mad creature, while Hero menaces tissue paper and glue. They are quite addictive, though, these things – I so love looking at the colours with the sun coming through the window, and anything which reminds me to look outside, that the world will not always be covered either in rain or in mud, can only be a good thing. (I shouldn’t say this, really, given that the last three days have brought bright winter sunshine and crackling starry nights.)

Hero has a new coat, and pink and purple boots made for her by the very lovely shoemaker in Exeter. Her choice of colours, which was nice. The buckles are a complete sod, it must be said, but ultimately they are lovely boots, and how many people get to choose not only the colours but the style of their shoes, from a virtually limitless list of suggestions? If you can’t do it when you’re three and a half, then when?

Our newest familiar, Hecate, is settling in well. Wixon is, shall we say, quite taken with her.

The aforementioned winter sunshine. Good, isn’t it?

Both the heart-shaped casserole (full of rice pudding, a rather unlikely favourite of mine of late; sadly I am alone in this as neither Hero nor Quercus can be persuaded of its divinity) and the cow coffee pot visible in the background are things which make my heart sing whenever I spot them.

My ridiculous magpie-like love of shiny colourful things took over when I saw this sling (a Girasol Earthy Rainbow, if you’re interested) for a very good price indeed. We have bought next to nothing new for Mirth; it seemed nice that she should have a sling to herself, given how much use it’s going to get!

Our bedroom, post-transformation. Look! A ceiling! Which stays up and everything! Not particularly neat at the moment and covered in baby-related paraphernalia, but the room is blissful, and I am quite in love with the increasing quantities of wood which are becoming visible in our house. (Not least as their presence means the roof is not about to join us for afternoon tea.)

Mirth, aptly named both here and in real life, sporting a rather fetching bib and velvety suit passed on to us by some very lovely friends.

Mirth investigating this whole sitting malarky. Note also Pink Mousey, who looks like Sniff of Moomin fame, and who was sent to us by the lovely L-Q-S.

Mad hair and mad exploits with a new puzzle house and a plethora of animals. Hero’s ‘farm’ now includes – but is not limited to – a camel, a fox, a wolf and a wild boar. She is quite the connoiseur.

Such a smiley baby, it is just not true. Also, note plumptious legs – this babe is already nearly 20 lb! That explains all those night-feeds, then…

Star lights on shelves of jars with various bits and bobs. Including plastic reindeer. As you do.

It’s February already, somehow. Mirth will be six months old on the tenth of the month, and, in between sanding and waxing a Stokke highchair bought for £20 at an advent fair, I am wondering how on earth she can on the verge of joining us for dinner, yet her careful attentive watching as she sits on one or other of us while we eat assures me that she is, as does her poise when sitting and her reaching hands as she sees glasses and cutlery move. January has been a difficult month – one of those where everything goes wrong – and we are still finding our feet in its wake, but Mirth and Hero provide me with daily joy, genuine glee, at having two such bright souls in my life. (Yes, even at 3 a.m.) So, I am reminding myself of the happy things as I reach for the strength, the persistence, to sort out all the irritations, the challenges, the oh-you-just-bloody-well-would-wouldn’t-yous. (Current tally: frozen pipes = no washing machine or dishwasher and only sporadic sink water; new washing machine as last one gave up; car breaking down intermittently since Christmas Eve because of a veg oil conversion; my car’s brakes decided to stop working properly due to Comedy French Wiring (a well-known term on sad-git car forums); sleep, the lack thereof; money, the lack thereof; hard-drive dependability, the lack thereof.)

And in less than two weeks, we begin the next phase of work on our house, and Mirth, Hero and I will be heading to West Sussex for a few weeks (anyone local, do say hello!), to stay with Quercus’s mother while Quercus takes ceilings and plaster down. As part of this, we are meeting a central heating engineer later on today; I am quite excited (though I’d be so more fully if I had worked out an infallible bank-robbery strategy first, given that we are probably looking at about six thousand pounds to do the sort of thing we need to do). Our pipes are frozen for the fourth year running today; we had a heating plan and a plumbing plan designed for us by ex-friend David, and basically the latter sucks and the former never materialised. So, we’re finally taking the bull by the proverbial and seeing if we can at least fix the heating problem. At the moment, we have a woodstove in the living room, and that’s it. What we’re hoping for is a larger stove (12kw or so) with a back boiler, and thus a radiator in the kitchen, a towel rail in the bathroom, and radiators in each of the bedrooms. Of course, our house being difficult and minute, it is a tricky job and the heights and levels are all wrong. But it would be so, so good to get this sorted once and for all – I would not miss the lakes which appear on our windowsills each morning, and nor would I miss the mould which forms when things get damp, and nor would I miss the searing heat we achieve in the living room combined with the chilling see-your-breath cold of the bedrooms.

Still to come: the saga of the Steinway piano sale (or not), the rice pudden recipe to end all rice puddens, and the fact that I appear to be sliding towards vegan cooking.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. Where are you, internets?

I keep meaning to post here, but frankly I’m just not getting enough sleep to manage more than short stupid things which betray my lack of capacity. So, hello: here is a short stupid thing (i.e. myself).

Remind me that these nights of five, six, seven wakings will pass, would you, internets? And that being awake for two hours with one of those sessions is not de rigeur forever?

Oh oh oh – I should be writing approximately eight hundred words on the notion of radical homemaking; instead, I find myself tucked up on the sofa with my old friend Procrastination (who has been with us right over Chrimbly, not having anywhere else to go; oddly, he tells me that some people are childish enough to wish him elsewhere at such times, and that not a few of them were quite rude in their manner of telling him so!), tappetty-tap-tapping here, there, and everywhere except that very document which should be commanding my attention. Gosh. Quite like ol’ times, eh? Ah, the happy days of my thesis – what fun that was, and how we laughed.

Ahhh.

January. January. Time of resolution (or lack thereof). Of dark days, and short evening. Of lengthening days, and, if you are us, so far, cars which break down. Lots of times. Twice, with a small baby with bronchiolitis (a horrible closey-uppy breathing-tubesy thing which affects small babies rather nastily) on motorways. And then again, just for the fun of it.

So, tell me nice things which cheer me up. Tell me things which aren’t about asthma, or bronchiolitis, or middle-of-the-night wake-up calls. Go on. Do.

Dark evenings, darker mornings, and we inch closer to midwinter proper. Devon has yet to feel the real bite of winter cold this year – it’s been incredibly mild, such that while we’ve had the stove lit, we’ve also had the stairs door open, letting the heat drift upwards to the (unheated) bedrooms. The lime upstairs is still going off, we think, taking its time since it was put up on the new lath work in August, and creating strange patterns of damp-looking limewash from time to time as the warm air from downstairs makes its way into the eaves.

Things to make, things to eat (peppermint bark, in this case). Most of the shopping done (we’re going easy financially, so no huge trips, really, anyway), and the house reasonably ordered as we look forward to Quercus’s mother visiting soon. Oh, we are genuinely looking forward to another pair of hands. The small girl, who will forthwith be known as Hero because it’s getting confusing remembering to differentiate between ‘small’ and ‘smaller’, has been quite challenging of late, and while Quercus and I know that it’s a question of adjusting to new family dynamics while at the same time being three, and also being born of two parents who are, shall we say, determined, that knowledge is not making the day-to-day battles any easier, frankly. There is a lot of willpower in this household, and although we are sure that it’s the adults who are in charge, sometimes getting that message across takes quite a wee while, and no small measure of self-control and anger management. Hey ho – we shouldn’t have joined etc. etc. I am trying not to take the constant struggles for power and attempts to stage minor coups personally; I think it is just that Hero has reached that age when she is aware of possibilities, and the limitations to what she perceives is very frustrating, so she exerts control over the things she can control, i.e. the time it takes her to put shoes on, whether or not she is hungry/thirsty/tired, whether or not she can stand up/do her coat up/find something… The list is endless, and super-annoying in the short-term, but ultimately, I keep telling myself that she will not be doing such things when she’s five, and wow, how quickly that time will come around, if the first three and a half years are anything to go by. I am not always quite the parent I want to be (that calm oasis of maternal love), but I am trying my best, and hopefully the result will not be too too awful. I do wish that it wasn’t such an uphill struggle at the moment, that said; I feel myself to be constantly – though I know, rationally, that this is an exaggeration – at war with Hero, and I hate that, but I also feel equally strongly that I am her parent, not her friend, and that this means sometimes I have to be the Person Who Says, albeit kindly and respectfully and patiently, and she has to be the Person Who Does, albeit in a few minutes, in her own way. But oh, for it to happen just once in a while without the back-and-forth negotiating, or the wailing, or the howls of despair. This Too Shall Pass.

In amidst the challenges we are managing some organised chaos festive buggering-about. We have made stained glass windows à la Claire, and confections à la Orangette. We have baked saltdough stars for a wreath (our front door is getting to look positively civilised these days, as Quercus limewashed the house again this year, and repainted the sticky molasses-like stuff on the bottom of the house, and we have even now got a door which shuts properly and which you can only see daylight through in tiny cracks…), and used red paint and wooden stamps on brown paper for festive wrappings. I have replaced my obsession with needle-felted pumpkins with felt lantern-making; I made thirty-two of the little blighters for autumn, and have taken down those only to put up a miniature cream version for winter. (And no. No. We have not got a season table. No. For some reason, they make my toes curl. Instead, we have the rather ancient twiglet shelves. They are so-called because genuinely, the uprights look like giant twiglets. And on the twiglets lurk toys and something to indicate the passing of the seasons. That is as twee as it gets, frankly, without my need for a sick bucket becoming overwhelming. I know: a part of me is missing, and I am a horrible, awful person. Meh.)

I also realise that I haven’t put up any pictures of the upstairs of the house since Mirth, the name by which the smallest of our number will now be appearing here, arrived in August. I must remedy this, for lo! we hath walls, and ceilings, and even limewash! Quercus has been working quite hard lately to get the stairs finished off before Chrimbly; as a result, there are now bastard little cat paw-prints in white gloss on the carpet here and there (animals are such a joy), and hopefully we will have a completely-done-bar-the-stairs-carpet-because-flat-surfaces-are-hard-enough-let-alone-things-which-go-up-and-down first floor, at which point there will definitely be a picturethon (and yes, of course that is a word). Gratuitous baby pictures follows:

(How? How? How is she FOUR MONTHS OLD? It is not possible, I tell you: the laws of Physics – they be brokeded.)

For the meantime, I go, to make a fourth stocking, to mix up a Dark Solstice Cake, to sort out two more rolls of wrapping paper, to make yet more peppermint bark as presents, and to contemplate the genuinely horrific prospect of a grocery shop at some point this week. And you, dear reader? Full of festive spirit, or bah-humbugging in the corner?

… I will acknowledge the winter sunshine, and try to breathe deeply.

… I will look at all the things I have to be happy about, and try not to wallow, on this, the anniversary of your death, in thoughts that can do nobody any good.

… I will remember that you would want me to get on with the happy things, and to hold it all together, and to do more than muddle through life simply because you had to leave earlier than we’d planned.

… I will take my beautiful girls out for a walk in the windy brightness of a December day, and think only of trees, and snow, and smiles.

:: Racking wine into clean demijohns, ready to store for the winter

:: Oiling the oak counters, as they’re looking a little battered after some rather hard use…

:: Hunting for the sod-bagging bloody Advent tree which I made last year, so far fruitlessly. Cursed thing must be in (insert music of doom here) the attic… (Echoey voice-over: ‘And they were never seen again…’)

:: Lusting after lots of things online and in person (went to the market at Totnes, which I always enjoy), as, for once, I have some money burning a hole in my pocket after my birthday, and Quercus’s mother being super-generous (as she always is)

:: Celebrating the arrival of a new (to us; it’s a 1970-odd Roberts radio, with woody bits and red leather) radio after ours died about a month ago

:: Eating far too much crystallised ginger

:: Marvelling at the number of people driving around the lanes hereabouts with Chrimbly trees on their cars, already…

:: Gloating about the boots we’re having made for the small girl – foxglove and violet leathers, with good solid soles and velcro fasteny bits, ready, we hope, on December 20

:: Wondering if our counters will ever be this clear again…

(Also, pondering the fact that things which last cost so much; I want to buy a waffle iron (the stove-top variety) with some of the money I was given for the ol’ annual event – a crap-looking electric one can be had for £20, but a cast-iron number? More like £60 from what I can see so far, and pretty hard to find outside Scandinavia. Bastard UK. Bastard prices. Bastard disposable electricky nonsense. Bah, er, waffle.)

So, I finally finished brushing out my dreads. The resulting haircut is quite short, but not too bad, I’m thinking. It’s taking some getting used to after having hair which I just tied up ALL THE TIME for about, oooh, eighteen months, but I’m getting there, and gosh, it’s nice not to have an enormous mass of tangled roots to fret about!

Talking of tangled roots, the small girl and I made a sort of autumnal randomly-festive-feeling wreath thing for the door, using the (I think…?) wild clematis that Quercus and I hauled back from the woods the year that we moved here. We added lots of leaves, dipped in beeswax, and there you go. The small girl greatly enjoyed the dipping; man, there was wax EVERYWHERE, but sometimes I think it’s worth it. Of course, it is entirely possible that I was singing a rather different song when cleaning the spots off the hob and the counters the next day… Though the leftovers did make two rather nice-smelling pots of balm, with rosemary, thyme and marjoram.

The days are moving so quickly here that, although I often intend to post bits and bats, somehow I don’t seem to get around to it. I’ve made some felt bunting, for example, and wanted to post pictures, but haven’t even got around to taking them off the camera yet…. And I’ve also smugly made Chrimbly puddings, courtesy of a good friend’s excellent decision that we should meet once a week for what has become known as a Crafternoon (heh – see what I did there? A wit without parallel, moi), foisting our children upon one another in the hope that sufficient exposure will foster friendship, or, at least, tolerance, while we embark on crafting adventures which will keep our maternal sanity in the darkness of the winter months, where summer’s outdoor answer to so many problems has the nerve to keep such very short hours, and to cover itself in mud and rain.

The smallest of our number continues to ensnare me. I worried when pregnant that, while I knew I would love this child, I might not feel as strongly as I had the first time. Of course, completely ridiculous – her conquest of us has been every bit as absolute, and just as unwitting. She seems to have developed a lovely rhythm – sleeping for a couple of hours morning and afternoon, and then a short cat-nap at about 4.30 before we all pile into the bath and thence the usual bedtime palava.

Of course, all bets are off at night, but then she is only three months old, and I think it’s a little early to be worrying overly about how many times she wakes. I’m in the fortunate position of having Quercus to hand her over to for a half-hour or so in the morning, which really helps the sanity stakes, and of having a four-day weekend every week since Quercus moved to working three longer days as opposed to the four afternoons he’d previously worked. (On a financial note, having only one part-time wage is not ideal while I’m on maternity leave, but this is the bit where I keep reminding myself that we made these choices for a reason: we want to be able to spend time together, all of us, in one big sticky heap, and not being at work for forty hours a week may mean we’re a bit hard-up when we do so, but at least we’re all here; we also get much more flexibility in terms of getting major work done on the house, which is very necessary if we are to finish it before we are old and grey.) (Insert radical home-making-style rant here.) (No, really.)

I appear also to be knitting three hundred things. Well, at least mentally. I have mittens on the go courtesy of Claire; dark pink and purple stripes, as the small girl has just chosen these colours for the boots she is having made as a Chrimbol present from her grandma. (We appear to be moving to the end of her Red Years, where All Must Be Red, Or There Will Be Trouble; I am now so accustomed to looking for red things that I don’t quite know how to get out of the habit… Purple and pink? Surprisingly girly, though the pink is a very good shade, and she is super-picky about it not being pale and wussish, so I guess I will adapt.) (Just as well, come to think of it; have you tried finding a coat for a small girl which is red and not horribly shiny? Ye gods, they’re hens’ teeth. Which is why a purple candidate and a khaki alternative are on route, on approval, as it’s getting a little more seasonally appropriate here in the last day or two, and already there have been complaints of frostbite from a certain young lady.)

Also, we have been off adventuring about the place, enjoying not doing work on the house in every spare minute. Of course, this means that we have yet to touch the landing and stairs since the smallest joined us in August, but hey, sanity is more important, right? Quercus took this picture when we on a jaunt to Dartmoor, where, I have decided, we do not go often enough. There is something so uplifting about the space, the huge views across the landscape, that we always seem to come back feeling renewed and refreshed, as if we’d had a whole holiday, rather than just a day away from the usual views and the rhythm of our everyday existence. So, perhaps a monthly visit is in order, methinks. I leave you with some tors. Impressive, aren’t they? The small girl certainly thought so. The smallest? Well, she mostly slept in a striped sling, snuggled up inside Quercus’s fleece against the wind.

It’s a funny thing, but every time I find myself with time on my hands, I end up doing sweet fuck-all with it. This weekend is no exception: Quercus and the small girl have gone to visit his mother, so it is just me and a certain smaller girl in the house (well, if you don’t count the cats), and I am at liberty, really, to do anything, given the portability of the smallest of our number, and her current pattern of snoozing in the day.

Yet… Largely, I have done nothing. I have, mind you, finished brushing out my dreadlocks (all hail!), and I’ve been to a friend’s house for a haircut (all hail twice!), and I’ve come back and done the usual faffing and oh-good-lording that goes with haircuts. And I’ve done boring things like laundry, and grocery-shopping, and house-tidying, and small-local-town-sauntering, and nappy-changing and baby-feeding. But other than that, nothing. The plans I have all fall to one side; the ideas remain nothing but that. Why is this, I wonder? I do feel motivated to do things, but somehow when given the opportunity to do all the things that I normally lust after (uninterrupted knitting time! undisturbed felt-bunting-making time! baking! serious cleaning of a once-a-season type!), all I do is just sit here, with the odd potter on the inter thrown in for good measure.

I have until Tuesday afternoon, when the small girl and Quercus will come back.

So. Here are the things I could do.

:: Knitting. Slightly dispiriting, as I’m about halfway through knitting the small girl a rather nice berry-coloured cardigan, and have just discovered that I’ve fucked up the ribbing at the bottom of one half of the front. The half that I’ve just finished, of course. And I discovered this by not fucking up the other half, and then realising the difference. Arse.

:: Bitumen-painting the bottom of the house, so that Quercus doesn’t have to. Well, the appeal of that… is, er, tremendous, obviously.

:: Felt bunting. I’ve made 32 little lanterns of felt, all hanging in the room between (which is my new name for our old dining room; it speaks of pleasant trips between the worlds, does it not, while drawing a pleasant veil over the mould to which said room is prone), and have plans to make some smaller ones in cream felt for hanging on the Christmas tree.

:: Bleaching the downstairs of the original house. Yay. Such fun. Can’t wait. But… if I don’t do it, it won’t get done, and the alternative is to live with encroaching mould until next spring, when we’re hoping to gut the two rooms involved.

:: Making a boiled wool dress for the small girl. I have two rather nice charity shop-find wool jumpers, just itching (ha!) to be made into something delectable…

:: Knitting the smallest girl a winter hat. Which is slightly otiose, given that she’s already got a very nice Noro Kochoran number which I knitted for her sister; I just don’t want everything to be a hand-me-down for her.

So, gentle reader, what should I do? Some of these things, or something completely different? Suggest-me-do.

:: A very large jar of crystallised ginger

:: 62 dreadlocks brushed out, 18 to go

:: A quiet house

:: The small girl asking if it’s playschool today and being happy that it is

:: The smaller girl beginning to show some rhythm to her days (though let us not speak of the nights…)

:: The gradual clearing of sloe wine, revealing the gorgeous ruby colour when the sun shines through the demijohn

:: Ogling beautiful things on Etsy and finding it’s enough just to look at lots of bright colourful things
all together, without actually buying them (which is just as well, given how little money we’ve got right now!)

:: An ‘Escargot’ begonia, with spiral leaves

:: The smell of valerian oil in the steam of the bathroom

:: The small girl’s new sheepskin boots, bought in a sale for £6…

:: Felt lanterns à la Rhthm of the Home

:: Apple, vanilla and spice loaf (complete with flax and linseed)

:: The smell of woodsmoke as I open the back door

:: A pair of bright green peering out from the back of a deep shelf in the sitting room, as Hecate, our new puss, settles in (and yes, the flipside of that is that Pyewacket has yet to reappear, a fact which continues to sadden me, but which I’m having to accept as part of life in the busyness of our days)

:: The fresian-patterned coffee pot which I gave Quercus for his birthday, popping away on the stove

:: A certain babe’s bright smile, readily and often given.

And you?