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?

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?

:: 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?

I am utterly defeated – by my own hair! First, there was the ongoing dreadlocks dilemma: to dread, or not to dread. There were many and varied thoughts about that whole area, I can tell you. The knots. The washing issue (can you? should you? how do you? how often do you? what with?). The cutting-them-out issue (do you have to? is there any alternative? how long before you have to do that to get them out?). The would-I-get-bored issue (which is of course probably the most irritatingly navel-gazey of the lot). But fundamentally, I really like the way dreads look, and having toyed with the notion since I was about eighteen, I thought what the hell, and pretty much let my hair go its own way.

That is not to say that I stopped washing it, I hasten to add. This whole ‘you can’t wash dreads’ thing is a myth. No. I just stopped using conventional shampoo, switching instead to either a combination of apple cider vinegar and bicarbonate of soda or Dr. Bronner’s, very dliute.

Anyway. Fast forward quite some time, and just by dint of not having very much time to spend faffing about with hair, I had developed quite a set of dreads. Mostly, I looked like Medusa, but in a rather good way (though your mileage may vary on that one). I still had loose ends, but the dreads themselves seemed to form fairly easily in my hair, and I liked the way it looked. I kept them uniform by pulling them apart to avoid the dreaded (ha!) monodread look favoured by, well, drunk tramps, but other than that and the odd spot of twiddling, all was well in dreadlock world.

Then.

Oh, then.

Then I decided to blunt the ends.

Which I did.

When heavily pregnant.

With a felting needle.

Over several weeks.

And suddenly, all was not well in dreadlock world. Well, not that suddenly – I suppose it sort of crept up on me over the next, say, month or two, until lo! the hair! it was fucked! beyond all recognition! And all that patience I had celebrated when putting the damn dreads in in the first place seemed rather to have been outpaced by the urgent need to comb! to comb like buggery! Loops, bumps, twists, tangles, knots, and did I mention the loops? I looked like a severe hedgecutter incident had taken place.

The problem is, I still do. Only rather more-so now, given that I’ve brushed out about fifty of the eighty-odd dreads I had. From the front, all is well. When tied up, all is well. But down. Oh, down. Down is another story. Down is a chaos of loose hair, no-longer-pregnant-thus-losing-shedloads-of-hair-anyway chaos. With roughly the crown of my head still dreaded, even the significant portion which I have combed out is still showing an unnerving tendency to lock up with monotonous dedication.

So, I’m having to face the fact that I’m probably going to have to cut the little fuckers out. There are too many of them to just chop the odd one out and get away with still having long hair, and it’s not patience which is the problem in terms of detangling the remaining ones – nope: I just haven’t got the time to myself in which to do it without the rest of the hair having turned into a bird’s nest in the meantime, I think.

But you know, I’m trying to see the bigger picture. One of my closest friend’s little girl has been having open-heart surgery today. She is doing well, and hopefully the worst is over, but it serves as a timely reminder that hair is just hair, for the love of all that’s holy. I’ve been feeling pretty frumpy lately – not enough sleep, constantly covered in some sort of liquid, leaking milk everywhere, clothes both ancient and ill-fitting – and have been thinking again about the two stone in weight that I would like to lose. Maybe this is the time for me to actually take the bull by the horns, chop the sodding hair off (at least it would end the oh-so-boring chore of attempting to brush it all through) and lose the damn weight. Or at least try to. This could be a good thing. I used to have short hair, and I loved it. Now I feel like I would be a huuuuuge fat troll with a little short-haired head, but perhaps I need to get over that and just move on to the next bit. Or something more zen-like and self-accepting.

So, I think I’m going to give it until the other side of the weekend. If I’ve made significant progress by then, then I’ll stick with the brushing. If not, I’m going to give my hairdressing friend a large challenge in the not-too-distant.

As for the weight, well, it’s goodbye pies for the foreseeable, I fear. And you, chocolate: that means you too.

Remind me: there is life without cake, right?

Today is the autumn equinox, and we have spent the afternoon picking blackberries in the warmth of unexpected sunshine, with the drone of tractors ploughing the field behind our house. It never ceases to amaze me, the difference that a bit of sunshine can make, coupled with achieving a few things, albeit small things. Somehow, quietly, this week has turned around: there are now seven gallons of wine fermenting on the back of the counters, their quiet glugging a fascination to the smallest member of the Earthenhousehold, and two pints of crabapple cordial are sitting in the fridge, accompanied by a pint of sloe and apple. Apple crumbles have been baked, and pounds and pounds of apples, crabapples, sloes and blackberries have been picked. Pictures have been drawn on the chalkboard, messages have been left for small people using magnetic letters on the fridge, paintings have been done, play-dough snails have been made. Nappies have been washed, dried in the clever north wind and brought in smelling of woodsmoke. The chimney has been swept in preparation for the colder days to come, and the wood shelter is fully stacked.

I breathe out.

Yesterday evening, Quercus went to a rehearsal of the orchestra he plays for, and really enjoyed it. His orchestra is playing Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, which he loves.

Yesterday evening, I did very little beyond knitting a few more rows of the small girl’s winter cardigan (a beautiful berry-coloured wool which was part of the stash of wool I inherited from my mother, thus giving me an extra sense of autumnal nostalgia as I use it).

Yesterday evening, my elder girl was asleep at seven o’clock, having been friendly, chatty and helpful all afternoon.

Yesterday evening, my younger girl, stil so very little, was asleep not long after, having slept deeply and restfully three times during the day, in her basket on the counter in the kitchen (she may not have been born in the kitchen, which is where I thought I’d labour, but she is certainly spending most of her time in there!); she stayed fast asleep until just gone midnight, her first stretch of five hours.

The wheel turns, and with it, life moves on.

Ohhhhhhhhhh, I so want to be that smug picture of maternal contentment, cuddling two idyllic blonde children close to me while wearing something ridiculously goddess-like and oozing a generosity of spirit which would Kofi Annan look mean.

Instead, I am sitting on the sofa, my pyjama bottoms not even having made it on after a very rushed bath, attempting not to cry because of the gruesome day we have just had.

The short version: the small girl is being a complete trout to Quercus, ignoring everything he says or doing the exact opposite (today: several fits were thrown, including the getting-out-of-the-car fit, the walking-on-my-own fit, the Mama-must-hold-my-hand fit, and finally, my personal favourite, the running-away-near-traffic fit) while insisting on my presence nearly all the time and screaming at anything which doesn’t suit her, whether it be dinner, her clothes, or just the colour of the sky. Meanwhile, the tiny girl has slept for about twenty minutes today (ominously familiar), despite slings, rocking, feeding, walks, drives and being left to it, and is now thoroughly overwrought, as she was yesterday, having done similarly.

We have no plans for dinner beyond the realisation that probably eating some would be a good idea. The kitchen is reasonably chaos-free after I blitzed it today while Quercus was out for fit number one with the small girl, and the house isn’t too bad overall, but we are struggling, frankly, and I have no idea how to get the tiny girl sorted, given that she is resisting even my most determined attempts to settle her.

This is a bit shit, really. I am thinking things like ‘this too shall pass’, while feeling horribly depressed at the idea of bedtime, as that merely means the start of the night shift. I’m not getting to catch up on sleep at all, really, because the tiny girl isn’t sleeping long enough for me to sleep, so I’m losing about three hours of sleep a night and not catching up. I know this doesn’t help, but I can’t find a way out of it at the moment. On top of this, Quercus is having trouble sleeping (he’s downstairs at nights these days), and I am worried that he’s depressed, basically (he has a few north-wind tendencies normally, and has been taking anti-depressants for the last eighteen months or so). He’s tireder than I am, which makes no sense considering he’s getting more sleep and I’m even taking both children so that he can ‘catch up’ while wondering how this can be, yet still he’s tired, and we’re both pretty fed up. I feel – probably unfairly – like I’m carrying us all, while getting bugger-all break and bugger-all sleep, and someone is nearly always shouting or screaming at me, grabbing me or clambering all over me.

On top of this, cheese seems to make a grumpy baby grumpier, and Pyewacket has been missing for over a week.

I feel utterly crap even posting this because generally I don’t talk about his being depressed, and I don’t talk about the crap things here really because for the most part, I prefer this blog to be upbeat, a cheery space which might ask how you’re doing rather than bending your ear about all things cruddy. But for once, this is where I’m at, and I need to vent about it.

And so, dear reader, how are you?

Still here. Still delighted. Quite tired, though, and struggling to find time for the ol’ interwebs. Back shortly, though. With added crabapple jelly and just a smidgin of quince wine. Oh, and the odd predictable baby pic, probably.

How are you all?

This babe put in its appearance yesterday at 10.00 after a ridiculously short and straightforward labour, at home, completely drug-free. She weighs 7lb 12 for those of you who are statistically minded, and is absolutely lovely. And so, to bed.

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.