It’s no good – I’m still feeling a bit down in the dumps. Last night I ended up ranting about lost dungarees (two pairs thereof), a lost hat (which I knitted, last winter, and which I’m very attached to, not least as it’s the first hat I managed which really worked, and it involved Noro yarn), general housework dudgeon, and the overwhelming feeling of never managing to finish anything.

To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.

ARGH.

I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.

The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.

Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.

So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.

I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.

So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.

And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?

This morning finds Devon drizzling and grey; predictable, of course, given that we are hoping to go off adventuring tomorrow. Having had three weeks or so of hard work, something involving a pootle, tea and a scone and a walk somewhere other than the fields or woods on our doorstep is called for. Deluge notwithstanding.

Truth be told, I’m feeling a little bit flat. I’ve lost my oomph, and I just can’t quite recall where I saw it last. (Though I think it might have been somewhere in Cornwall.) It’s not terminal, and it’s not disastrous; I just need some time off, and a spot of fun, and probably to finish a few of the projects that I’ve got on the go. Do you ever find that you start a nice list of things To Do, feeling all goody-McTwo-Shoes about it, only to find that where the list once relieved all anxiety about its contents simply in the writing of it, it has now become something of an albatross, swinging around your neck and gently poking you in the backside with its long and angular beak? Yes, well: that.

I have a list of crafty things that I want to do – and yes, I do want to do them – but very little is actually happening on them. This is partly because I’ve chosen things that I don’t really know how to do (a cabled jumper, for example, is probably not quite the best way to ease myself back into knitting after a summer-long break), partly because I’ve been doing quite a bit of freelance work recently (and that normally happens when the small girl is asleep, a precious hour which I could otherwise devote to such fun activities as, you know, cleaning, or making dinner [which, actually, is a fun activity for me, not least as it encourages me to get through those 52 Recipes in 2010, but still... Sometimes I just want to do something selfishly crafty, even if said selfishness is eventually destined for, say, Quercus or the small girl]), and partly because I’m a little lacking in the old organisation/motivation department at the moment.

I’m trying to avoid procrastinating, which means I’m spending less time online – I know that one of my worst habits as a PhD student was the pissing away of hours reading blogs in which I felt only limited interest, purely because my A-list had yet to update, so at least having experienced the crappitude that comes from having wasted a day, I know that I feel rather better – despite short-term crabbiness – if I just get on with things, rather than putting them off while glumly reading t’inter. So, I have started knitting a rather exciting hat for the small girl, with prompting from Ally, who donated wool and a kick-off, and I have drafted a new list (because obviously lists are my thing… ahem…) which is radically shorter, changing the original list to a list intended to cover autumn, rather than, well, now. I’ve also added some easy wins – lengthening the small girl’s felted dress of last winter, making some more felt acorns for her, getting up to thirty on the recipes challenge – which should spur me on a bit.

I’ve come to realise since finishing my PhD that I do seem to need Things To Do, to work towards, to achieve, rather than just being able to pootle through the days in a blithe and carefree manner. I think Coffeeslut‘s comment that I might be ‘unsuited to being / perceiving [myself] to be stationary while the world moves / seems to be moving on around [me]‘ is probably quite apt; I need activity, and organisation. Here’s to autumn coming, and with it, a new sense of vigour.

Happy Friday, interwebs: it is nearly time for a lie-in.

How is it that for about four years, we lived with one functioning cupboard and the driftwood larder (Quercus’s first attempt at cupboard-making) and we seemed to have everything stored, if not sensibly, then at least accessibly, without any particularly noticeable oversights, yet now, we have acres – no, hectares of storage, of glorious oak cupboards, and we’re filling them up within six months of their completion? Where has all this stuff come from, I ask? Do I really need six mince-pie trays, given that I normally only use two of them? And how do I come by EIGHT round cake tins of approximately the same size and style? One, two or even three I could understand, but EIGHT? That speaks of more than a momentary lapse of concentration, doesn’t it?

Anyway.

One of my favourite things is cupboard reorganisation. I’ve been rejigging things about a bit ever since Quercus finished our cupboards, and I think I’m just about happy with where everything lives, despite my intense puzzlement about the quantity of detritus we appear to have had stored in the sheds. I knew there were more cups and plates and things, but I hadn’t realised just how much baking crap I have. It’s… interesting. I suppose it’s the result of inheriting lots of bits as the aged parent prepared to move house; he doesn’t bake, and thus handed all the things that were my mother’s over to me, and then, as they came in dribs and drabs, I shoved them somewhere convenient and forgot about them, not noticing the very plural nature of those dribs and drabs. Well, at least if it turns out that the answer to the universe is, in fact, a pie of mince, I will be well prepared.

Part of all this unearthing has been rediscovering old recipes that I love, and baking things I remember making with my mother when I was small. Just as I can recall sitting on our counters and handing her things from the cupboards while performing minor physical miracles in avoiding bashing my head on the wall-mounted storage, now I see the small girl sitting in front of me, swiping dried fruit from the various bags and boxes which live in the larger Dried Fruits storage box (fortunately without the physical miracles, as our kitchen is large enough to avoid wall units, a personal loathing of mine), and covered in various quantities of flour, sugar and sunflower oil.

All this baking requires the right clothing, clearly…

So last night, I made her her first apron. A very kind friend recently donated various swathes of fabric to our cause, and in amongst them was a rather nice upholstery-weight brown, which now has a few buttons added, and some red thread, and a wooden heart. I think it’s probably going to be EEEEnormous on her because I sized it by gawping at some dungarees of hers which were kicking about after she’d gone to bed, but hey – room to grow, or something.

And now the bit where I have to wait to give it to her, because we’re out with friends this afternoon, so I must learn me some patience. Remind me how that works…? I’ve never learned thus far… I do love making things for her, and I also love the feeling of surprise that I get every time something actually works out – after years of being utterly crap at sewing, it constantly amazes me that I can do this, and it may even work. Long may it last, both the feeling, and the making.

And you? Any works-in-progress at the moment?

I’m mid-camera change at the moment, and have thus yet to do battle with the outgoing camera in order to try to extricate some pictures from its grubby mits, but I just wanted to say how very exciting it is to watch our workshop coming together at last. It’s about two years or so since we worked out detailed plans for where it would go and how it would be built, and now, watching it actually take shape, I realise how nice it’s going to be. It’s not quite your average shed in that it’s HUGE, and so far its frame has been put together using free and recycled wood. Eventually, it’s going to have waney-edged boards for walls (the planks of wood with the curved edges of the tree left in place) and shingles (wooden tiles) for a roof; it’s a very Quercus structure, in short.

Yesterday we* clambered about on it, putting up the first two roof trusses, and slotting the beam which forms the apex into place. Ridge pole, I believe. It was interesting; there were Very Big Nails involved, and a lot of up-and-down, but very little swearing or getting cross; Quercus and I work pretty well together, and fortunately I don’t seem to drive him quite as demented as his mother does, which is reassuring. I’ve got pictures of various stages of it thus far; the floor supports are in place, and the walls’ studwork, and now two of the zillions of roof trusses are up – the overall impression is of an ark, frankly.

The bark is still on part of the wood because it came free from a local sawmill, so hadn’t been processed because they wanted to get rid of it. We’re going to treat it to help it remain solid against the wet Devon weather, but the wood chaps estimate it should last for twenty years or more even untreated.

That green amorphous blob is the table saw, hiding under a dumpy bag because the weather, despite the blue skies here, has been so unpredictable for the last month or so that you just never know when it’s going to tip it down suddenly… Gives an idea of scale, too – the apex is about eleven feet up.

See what I mean about the ark-like quality? It’s even more this way now that all the roof trusses are in place; more pictures to follow now that I am once more be-camerad.

In other news, pumpkins. Well, specifically, Hooligans. Quercus’s mother has grown a packet of these, and brought down a large bag of the upshot, which is to say, about ten little pumpkins of a most aesthetically pleasing nature. I chopped the lids off, whipped out the seeds and that odd stringy bit in which pumpkins seem to specialise, and in went a rather pleasant combination of cheese, lentils, beans and brown rice.

I’m hoping they keep well; we have another five or so to go, and next time I’m wondering about a nut, mushroom and brown rice thing for the stuffing business…

Stuffed pumpkins
Ingredients
Some pumpkins (!)
An onion or two
A large lump of cheese
About a mugful of lentils
About a mugful of beans, barley, split peas – whatever comes to hand, pulses-wise, really
Quite a lot of garlic
About a mugful of brown rice
Some herbs – I used basil, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano
A slosh of Tabasco
A stockcube
A couple of eggs

Then…
Boil up everything bar the pumpkins, the eggs and the cheese in a large pan, using enough water to mean the end result is a sticky-ish stodge, rather than something needing draining – you want to eat all those herby bits and bats, rather than watching them disappear down the plughole. When you’re sure the pulses aren’t going to poison anyone, remove said pan from the heat and grate in the cheese. When the resulting even-more-sticky mass has cooled a bit, mix in the eggs.

Carve off lids for the pumpkins and take out the seedy bit. I stabbed the sides a few times because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and dobbed a little bit of butter on the edges here and there before filling the cavity with the cheesy lentil mixture and putting the lid back on. (Because I am greedy of a generous disposition, the lids were more sort of squodged on top than actually replaced, but this, I found, led to an agreeably crunchy collar of cheesy loveliness around the edge of the lid when cooked.) Pop the filled pumpkins on a tray, with a tablespoon or two of water to help the skins cook, and a few little dots of butter on their lids. Cook them at about 180°c for about an hour; they went very nicely with some opportunist baked taters, and some steamed courgettes. Having only encountered pumpkin in either a soup or a pie context prior to this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted quite strongly, and that its texture was rather like potato; I’d thought the filling would serve largely to disguise something a tad on the unspeakable side.

After this, a nice sit-down and a cup of tea is called for, as is a large slice of tiffin, which became my poor-man’s-Rocky Road yesterday when I realised that I simply wasn’t going to find proper marshmallows, as opposed to the ghastly Flump-style aberrations. So, I took this route:

Tiffin
Wossinit?
100g dark chocolate
2 tbsp honey
100g butter
A large pinch of cinnamon
A drop of Angostura bitters
About half a mug of sultanas
About half a mug of roasted walnuts
100g ginger biscuits, with a few digestives thrown in because I could

So…
Melt the chocolate, honey and butter together; I tend to ignore that whole ‘gently’ malarky and just blast the bastard in the microwave because I have no patience, and so far it’s worked just fine. When you’ve got a gorgeous silky mix of chocolate with which you’d quite like to just retire quietly to the shadows, spoon in hand, resist this temptation, and take out the resulting frustration on those biscuits, damn them. Pop them in a small bag and bash the blighters until they are fine crumbs. (Take that, you… you… biscuit!) Add in the nuts (I think pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or really anything crunchy would work equally well) and the sultanas (which, likewise, you could replace with any sort of dried fruit you fancied, I should imagine), and then pour on the melted chocolate mixture. Mix it all in thoroughly, then turn it out into a 20cm square tin you’ve lined with something like foil or baking paper (which makes for a rather easier turning-out manoeuvre later on) and stick it in the fridge to set. When you want to cut it into pieces (assuming you get that far), whip it out and let it warm up a tad so it doesn’t crack when you cut it, and bingo: chocolatey stickiness of a rather pleasant, deeply un-labour-intensive nature.

So, pictures of woody bits to follow, and also of pumpkins, in theory, at least. Anyone got any other pumpkin recipes worth sharing? I’d love to see my pumpkin prejudices trounced once and for all.

* For once, not the Royal We which means Quercus, but both of us; positioning timber which is that heavy is simply not possible single-handed unless you have better access to your site, and probably quite a few lengths of rope for levering things.

1. On Friday afternoon, the small girl and I made our second batch of cheese biscuits. Once more, she did the washing-up.

2. We also racked wine into clean demijohns, adding sugar and a lemon while we were at it. I’m not sure it’s entirely legal, making wine with the aid of a two-year-old, but it was certainly good fun.

3. I got to sleep until eleven on Saturday morning. SLEEP. Did I mention that raveled sleeve of care malarky? Consider mine knitted, at least temporarily.

4. Quercus’s mother, while deeply irritating in many ways, arrived on Saturday, and brought with her (like the car-journey game) four nearly-completely-prepared casseroles, some dark chocolate buttons, four bottles of red wine of the sort we tend not to buy because we’re broke, a packet of geranium-flavoured giant chocolate buttons and a bag full of wooden bits and bobs for small person amusement purposes. She Is Not All Bad.

5. We have had a cloth-nappy weekend; the small girl, catching sight of a stray which had so far escaped being atticked, said ‘fluffy nappies! I like a wear one of them!’ and there has been no looking back since. So far, no rash; we’re still using disposables at night for fear of tempting not only fate but all sorts of urine-related gods, but it feels extraordinarily nice to hear a small girl saying ‘a blue nappy! wiv stars on it! I show Daddy!’, and to know that not only is this meaning we’re using fewer disposables (and thus emptying the bin far less frequently), but also we’re getting a bit more use from the cloth nappies, which I really loved, and the small girl is more aware of, shall we say, various processes taking place.

6. I took the small girl for a walk in one of the many fields around the Earthenhouse yesterday afternoon. While we were walking down the lane to get there, she said ‘Granny pop out of bed!’. On closer examination, this turns out to be a name for convolvulus; it’s so nice to find she’s picked up things like this. Her vocabulary now includes daffodil, sunflower, oak, beech, ash, root, stump, dandelion, daisy, elderflower, rosehip, acorn, cob nut, conker and field.

7. When I was a small child, I had a rather ugly white painted chair, sized accordingly. Said chair came to us when the aged parent moved north, as part of his cabinet reshuffle, as it were, and has sat in a neglected corner of the ex-dining room (if so small a room can be said to have neglected anythings) ever since. Yesterday, I pounced on it, sanded the blighter to within an inch of its life, paint-stripped the tight corners where I couldn’t get either the sander or sandpaper in, and then waxed it into oblivion. It looks completely different; proper wood colour is rather nicer than chipped white paint, and the seat itself is made of a piece with really nice grain, previously hidden under all that horrid paint. What’s more, said small girl likes it, which is probably the best bit of all.

8. For a long time, I thought ratatouille was a repugnant concoction of things which, unpleasant enough on their own, became truly repulsive in combination. My, how times have changed. Last night marked Ratatouille No. 2, and it was successful enough to mean large quantities being eaten by the small girl, and some being frozen for the hereafter, while Quercus and I were fit to burst.

Ratatouille
Ingredients
A tin of tomatoes or six large fresh ones
An aubergine (large, in this case)
Two or three onions
Two or three courgettes
Some mushrooms
Some herbs
Some Tabasco
Some brown sugar
Some garlic (by which I mean ‘a lot of’)
A good sprinkle of black pepper and some paprika
Slug of olive oil

Then…
Chop the onions reasonably small, and dice the aubergine. Sling them into a large pan with some oil, and give ‘em a good fry until they are nice and soft. Sling in the rest of the ingredients (having diced the mushrooms), poke them about suspiciously with a wooden spoon, pop a lid on and retreat for about twenty minutes or so, leaving the pan simmering reasonably briskly. Swig wine. Realise Some Time Has Passed. Return to find pan gently overflowing condensation on to the hob, causing a rather nice smell. Heap piles of brown rice into a bowl which makes your portion look less greedy, add a few ladelsful of the ratatouille, and grate a spot of sharp cheddar on the top.

9. I have 16,000 words of proofreading to do; for this, I am getting over £200. While the work is tedious, the money – the MONEY! is coming at a very good time, bearing in mind the digger hire we’ve paid for recently.

10. This morning, the chap I car-share with was waiting for me in the lay-by where I pick him up; normally, I wait five minutes or so for him, and that few minutes costs me any chance of a good space. Today, easy.

And you? What’s happy-happy in your life today?

In between the bouts of navel-gazing which I do so, er, well, the small girl and I have also been baking. At the moment, the small girl’s favourite activities are mostly house-related – she cooks, bakes, cleans, and does the washing-up. If I had known that one could expect a reasonable return, in housework terms, on the investment in small people before the age of three, I’d've had a brace of them years ago.  Anyway, obviously this cooking-baking-cleaning is to be encouraged, not least because it means we do lots of things together that I really enjoy doing (though the cleaning… not so much), and on Sunday we managed to make our first batch of genuinely joint-effort cheese biscuits.  Viz.:

First we create the bedlam. Note presence of Nutkin, inveterate chef extraordinaire.

Then we spend at least half an hour washing it all up, many, many times.*

Then we sit back and marvel at what we’ve made. Not least as our child-friendly biscuit cutter set includes a star, a moon, a flower, a heart, and A PIG. The mind boggles.

Then we flog our wares to an unsuspecting Quercus.

The recipe we used was from Hugh Fernley Whittingstall‘s The River Cottage Family Cookbook, and was very successful, though we added A LOT more flour than the recipe indicated before the dough was vaguely workable.  The best bit, mind you, was getting to use the most excellent rolling pin set that LQS bought us the small girl, from the Early Learning Centre. They are all sorts of fabulous, and far nicer colours than on the ELC site. My favourite is the one with spots, which leaves a sort of crater-like set of circles and spots on the dough, making the moon-shaped biscuits we cut out very entertaining.

The original recipe has these as cheese straws, but we liked shapes better. It ended up  as something like this:

Cheesy Biscuits
Ingredients
150g grated cheese (we used strong cheddar, and ignored the ‘finely’ indication on the grating instructions)
100g butter (we used a soya replacement)
About 150 – 200g plain flour (the recipe thinks 100g, but that was just a sticky unrollable mess for us, perhaps because of the soya margarine)
A goodly sprinkle of chilli powder
The yolk of an egg (and very nearly the white, and the shell, in our case)

Then…
Bung it all in a reasonably large bowl and mangle it about the place until it forms itself into a nice ball of cheesey loveliness. Cover the entire universe in flour, then roll out the dough to, well, anywhere between half an inch thick and about three milimetres (why yes, I do think in feet and centimetres – how did you know?) before bashing the ol’ cutters through it as if there’s no tomorrow. Pop them on some trays, and stick in the oven at about 200°c for about ten minutes or so; HFW reckons twenty degrees higher, but our version looked like burning on the edges at that temperature, so we took the coward’s way out, rather than keeping our eagle eyes on them, and just turned the heat down. They lasted all of twenty-four hours, and I’m only surprised they were around that long, frankly, given our cheese-hoovering natures, as a family.

We also gave a vegan recipe a run for the first time over the weekend. I say ‘for the first time’, which is not to say that we’ve never eaten vegan food before, but that this is the first time I’ve used a recipe which was avowedly such, and the conclusion I drew was that, rather like my experiences with Cranks recipes, it was brilliant not least because the vegan bit was incidental to its general stuffaliciousness. It was this macaroni cheese, and yes, most of the reviewers are right about it.  I’m not writing the recipe out in full only because we didn’t really change anything, other than to approach measurements of ingredients with a blithe spirit which scorns the use of such mortal concepts as scales; I probably used twice the quantity of vegetables for the sauce, and I added a stockcube to the water in which they cooked. Definitely going into the repertoire, though, that one.

And before I forget, please to be noting of the tileage which is encroaching on the background of the picture. in which the small girl is washing up, above.  I started tiling this weekend, having had the tiles sitting in our bedroom (as you do) since, oh, the dark ages; so far, I’ve managed three rows, about halfway along the big wall behind the counters, but I have lots of sticky bits still to go, including tiling around the sink and – I shudder to think of it – the tap. But they’re ridiculously gorgeous colours, them there tiles, and I’m pretty pleased with the way they’ll look eventually. Plus, I can disguise any ineptitude in my tiling with the phrase ‘handmade’ and ‘artisan’, given that the tiles vary in size by as much as half a centimetre, and haven’t got a straight edge between them. Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. There you go. And you?

Number of new MacBooks gracing our kitchen table: 1

Number of shiny British pounds spent bringing about this happy state: not going to be thought about

Number of shiny British pounds about to be made by shameless flogging of iPod bought for £20 courtesy of Apple deal in shop: probably about £130

Number of hours spent in frustrating discussions about wireless router: mind-numbingly plural

Number of loaves of bread baked this week: 6. Six. SIX.

Number of presents currently scattered about the house in happy toddler disarray: approx. four billion

Number of cats snoozing, complete with muddy paws, on newly-waxed oak bench seat: 2. That’s eight paws, and forty claws. FORTY CLAWS.

Number of mothers-in-law currently entering their third – THIRD – week of residence: 1. Thankfully, they don’t tend to be a plural phenomena.

Number of hair-pulling insane discussions with afore-mentioned legal maternal relative: lost somewhere in the first twenty-four hours

Number of blog posts fermenting in Earthenwitch brain, or remnants thereof: 3, including dolls, cooking, and exterior painting of windows and doors which has greatly reduced the pikey appearance of our house.*

And you?

*Is it horribly anal of me to find it almost hand-clenchingly wrong to write a number, i.e. a numerical character rather than the word, followed by punctuation? Or, indeed, to use numbers rather than words full stop?

Laptop broken! Insanity setting in! Fear for future of self and family but getting blighter looked at on Friday so keep things crossable crossed please. Not least as replacement is something like £700.

Soon to come, internets and laptop permitting:

Birthdays, and smugness thereof courtesy of handmade presents and the rather excellent reception said goods were accorded;

Cooking, the doing much thereof, with recipes to boot;

Dolls, the concocting thereof;

Cob houses, and the large trenches appearing around them (or, er, it, specifically, it being our cob house in question).

And you?

I’m off to West Sussex for a week, with the small girl. We’re abandoning Quercus to his fate, which is to work on the house and finish various things off, in favour of an extra pair of hands to entertain personages of a diminutive stature (his mum), in favour of tidy gardens with sprinkler systems which are just asking to be played with, in favour of growing tomatoes in need of pollination help in the form of being rattled about each day, in favour of SOMEONE ELSE DOING THE COOKING. In short, it’s a sort-of holiday which gives Quercus the space to work without worrying that he’s causing utter chaos for the rest of us.

Other things: sourdough bread. Well. The small girl and I used Hugh F-W’s recipe, and though we followed it to the letter, I was surprised that the resulting loaf wasn’t more… well, different. Admittedly, given that I wasn’t using organic flour because I hadn’t got any, I did end up having to boost the starter with a scrap of yeast – could that be why, to all intents and purposes, it seemed an awful lot like, well, normal (in a homemade context) bread? I’d love to give it another go, as I hear all sorts of good things about sourdough, and so far, while it was nice, it wasn’t exactly the revelation I’d hoped for. Suggestions? Recipes? Pointers? In the meantime, I’ve been making that spelt recipe I posted a while back quite a lot – the only problem I have found with it is that, I think because of the ratio of water to flour, the top tends to flatten off during baking; I need to fine-tune quantities and rise time, I think, but the crumpetty texture is intriguingly beguiling. Crumpbread. I mean – !

Still other things: it’s the small girl’s birthday in a little over a week. She will be two on the first of June, and I have no idea quite where that time has gone. Last week, she cracked (if that’s the right verb) her first pun – a small fish finger-puppet was stuffed down her dungarees while an enormous grin formed on her face, and she then said, giggling so much that it took me a minute to work out what she was on about, ‘fish it out! fish it out!’. She is increasingly chatty, day by day; a friend told me that a two-and-a-half-year NHS check-up includes the questiof of whether a child has a vocabulary of c. 200 words – I should say that the small girl’s vocabulary now extends to something like 500 words easily. She speaks in phrases of up to about six or seven words, and often offers words I didn’t know she knew. Her company is a delight in so many ways, and we are having tremendous fun together, more-so than I’d ever imagined possible at this point. I’ve been making a few things for her birthday – so far, a small mattress, with washable quilt and pillow covers to go on a little wooden bed which Quercus is making for her various soft toys, and a set of napkins with a table cloth to supplement the tin tea-set we’ve bought her – and this week, while I have the unusual luxury of childcare in the form of the much-loved Grandma, I’m going to try my hand at making a Waldorf doll. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I’ve armed myself with various supplies, internet tutorials and ‘The Children’s Year’, which I read about here and couldn’t resist, so keep your fingers crossed that I don’t mangle it too badly, and if the results aren’t too horribly unexpected, I may even go so far as to post a picture.

I still have a birthday crown to make, using up some felt I’ve had kicking about for aaaages, and hopefully I’ll get through that in the coming week as well. Oh, and possibly some trousers for the small girl, and a summer dress, given that we are having improbably summer-like weather (I won’t go so far as to say that it is now summer, as this is Devon, which is in England, which makes really virtually any mention of the s-word the kiss of death in terms of ongoing, settled warmth without some hideous drawback, like rampant humidity or thunder or some-such appealing meteorological phenomena). Let’s hope the sewing machine continues its current mild manners, or the small girl’s vocabulary may be subjected to some developments I would rather postpone until at least, say, three.

Other, other things (ahem): the orchards which surround Earthenhouse are in blossom, and it’s a real sight to behold. Acres of careful rows of little stumpy cider apple trees, all weighed down with millions of dusky pink flowers, and humming with bees (some of whom live in hives at the back of the fields). The small girl and I rather like walking between the rows, surrounded by the busyness of said bees and the fragrance of the trees. The best bit, of course, is when Pyewacket and Wixon come with us too – other people walk dogs, but not us: we have walking cats.

(Since you ask, which you probably didn’t, the bonnet is made from a scrap of Kaffe Fassett’s lovely ‘Roman Glass’ fabric, because it is just tooooooo good. The colours! The circles! The – *passes out*)

I leave you with news that the caravan has finally departed the parish, after nearly a year of worrying, chivvying and general bollocking about with both its owner and the one-time friend who arranged its appearance here. We are not missing it, unsurprisingly, and I am still boggling at the situation, to say nothing of the fact that we still have a few things belonging to the one-time friend which, I imagine, he may at some point want back, but which he (apparently) can’t be arsed to come and get now. Irritating, but not eight foot by twenty, so surmountable, in the general scale of things.

Right. See you all on the other side, and have a lovely week.

So, I asked for nice things, and lo! nice things there were. Firstly, there was this extraordinarily nice parcel which winged its way to us from Claire at Whispering Acres. Look at all that loveliness. Approximately half a ton of felty goodness, complete with a very nice book indeed, together with some beautifully hand-dyed fleece and a rather very lovely hand-felted flower. Gosh, is all.

And then there were lots of lovely people coming out of the woodwork to tell me that I’m not a heinous arsehole, and that there are lots of lovely things cracking off in lots of lovely ways. (Yes, I am over-using the term ‘lovely’. No, I do not care. Yes, this shows an uncharacteristic lack of savagery. Blame it on the pastis.) Also, my very excellent chicken clock arrived this week – it has a pendulum foot which moves with the tickingness, and a chickeny face which could not fail to charm. Well, it charms me, anyway, and it serves as a reminder that, while we haven’t got hens just now, we are still Hen People, and, when the time is right and we have found the right set-up for keeping the laying ladies safe (and for giving them two areas of pasture, so we can rotate between seasons as Cheryl mentions here), we’ll have more hens, and we’ll reclaim our existing hens (who are living it up at Purple Towers for now).

Also rather pleasant was this evening’s dinner, which warrants a 52 Recipes entry, methinks. Thus:

Veggie Casserole with Herby Cheesy Dumplekins*
Wossinit?

For the casserole:
2 large onions
2 large carrots
2 parsnips
A fistful of garlic
About eight large mushrooms (or as many as are mouldering at the back of the fridge)
A slurp of olive oil
About a pint of veggie stock
A few bay leaves
About ¼ pint of white wine
A couple of tsp of cornflour

For the dumplekins:
4 oz self-raising flour
About 2 oz cheddar cheese
A fistful of fresh parsley
A knob of butter

Then…
Chop the parsnips up, coat them in a drop of oil and whack them in the oven to roast on a suitably incandescent temperature (I think I went for about 220°c, and that took about twenty minutes) until they’re roasted to destruction perfection (which = destruction minus approx. thirty seconds, in my experience).

Meanwhile, chop the carrots, onions, garlic and mushrooms up, and sling them in a pan. (I misguidedly used a rather large number, which meant that dinner looked a tad impoverished; note to self: smaller pan looks far more greedy-indulging). Fry that lot up with the slurp of olive oil for a few minutes, putting the mushrooms in last because of that thing they do where they appear to bring a pint of liquid (each!) to the party.

While that’s cooking, start on the dumplekins, so-called because they were far too small to be dumplings, but were clearly second cousins to that noble beast. So, pop the flour and parsley in a bowl, rub in the butter and then add the cheese. About four spoons of cold water should make a workable dough; divide that into about a dozen or so little lumps and form them into balls.

At this point, realise the parsnips have caught fire, or – no – wait – there can be smoke without fire, particularly if you last used the grillpan in about 1603. Rescue parsnips. Add the stock and the wine to the casserole pan, and cook until you’re no longer swooning from the alcohol fumes (oh, that’s just me?), before mixing up the cornflour with some cold water and slinging that in to thicken the sauce a bit. Boil it all up until you’re happy, and then throw the dumplings in, stick the lid on, and leave it to ferment on a low heat for about twenty minutes.

Finally, chuck in the parsnips, and scoff surprising quantities of this while attempting to balance the warring demands of wondering if you put in enough cheese, while knowing that to add more would be dangerously close to obscenity.

* This is loosely based on a recipe in Nadine Abensur’s Cranks Fast Food, a book which details, in my experience, food which isn’t really fast, but hey. The recipes are delicious, but often seem to call on stuff which I just haven’t got, and can’t even find in various supermarkets, so I end up going off on a tangent, which is why I say ‘based on’ in this case. However, the book’s well worth a look, and not least for such delights as the stuffed courgettes recipe. No, really.

I’ve been meaning to post lots of exciting things about lots of fascinating subjects, but, er, well, I’m brain-dead due to lack of sleep and a particularly un-scintillating copy-editing job which finishes today, so all I can come up with is the very lovely loaf recipe which I tried out yesterday, in need of a little something to distract from the aforementioned copy horrors. It’s a Cranks recipe, and I can honestly say that, other than the peanut butter and apple soup (which was never really going to work, was it, and if I’d read it in any other book, I wouldn’t even have paused for thought before damning it as the very worst sort of heresy), they are all fillers and no killers (see what I did there?).

So, here goes.

Spiced banana and apple loaf
Ingredients
1 apple, cored, peeled and grated
2 small bananas, mashed
Zest of a large lemon
2 oz sultanas (mixed dried fruit would work well, too)
1 lb of strong (bread) flour (I used a wholemeal spelt I just happened to have kicking about)
2 oz dark brown sugar (I probably used four, if we’re honest, because my hand slipped when sticking it in the bowl)
1 t(b)sp of mixed spice, cinnamon, nutmeg etc.
1 tsp quick-acting yeast
¼ of a pint of warm water

Then…
Pop about 4 oz of the flour in a bowl with the water and the yeast, and stick it somewhere warm to get nice and frothy. While that’s doing its thing, mash the bananas in with the grated apple and the lemon and the sultanas. When you’ve achieved a suitably frothy yeasty concoction, sling that in with the fruit, and add the other ingredients to form a dough-like consistency. Knead it for a bit, until it’s nicely formed, and then into an oiled (or silicone) bread tin with it, and off to a nice warm place to rise for about an hour. (Because I was using antiquated yeast and bread flour damp enough to have lumps, mine didn’t rise masses, but hey – let’s not judge.) Stick the oven on to about 200°c, and bake the blighter for about thirty minutes. As with ordinary bread, it’s done when it’s brown on top and sounds hollow when tapped in a peremptory manner on the base.
V. nice with a spot of butter on it, and works extremely well as toast. The funny thing is that, unlike many other banana-featuring recipes of my ken, this one hides its banananess extraordinarily well – you wouldn’t know they’d even been near it, never mind having moved in, wholesale.

Coming in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future:

- fat bells (and more dready loveliness) – a more successful experience, so thanks to all who commented on our first attempt;

- another ginormous-needles-make-fast-work knitted cardigan for the small girl, just, predictably, as the weather gets warmer;

- ponderings on when to sit and think about things, and the advantages and disadvantages thereof, and when to just get the fuck on with something and hope for the best.

Thursday is one of sometimes two nights a week when I am an orchestra widow. Quercus has been playing a rather large brass instrument (the tuba, since you ask) since he was small enough that he could probably have fitted inside its bell, had he wished to, and I have always felt strongly that he must continue to do so despite the usual call of the wild, which is to say the outland we laughingly call the extension. (It’s not that wild these days, honestly, yet the habit persists in thinking terms – I still see the things that need doing as much as the things that are already done, apart from during those brief moments when I manage to recall quite how far we’ve come – from hardboard interior walls and perpetually running-wet walls complete with a plywood ceiling and single-skin brick external walls…!) So, tonight he has wended his merry way to a rehearsal, where he will no doubt be tackling all sorts of musical delights. Or at least counting for a very long time. Which is something brass players excel at. (That, and relying on their neighbours to remind them of their cues when they forget to count altogether and doze off instead.)

While he is out, I am reuniting with my sewing machine. It has been off for a service with someone his agent laughingly described as ‘a sewing machine geek’; just as well, given that a bit of internet stalking revealed that it is actually well over a hundred, and thus something of a dying breed. Hopefully, I will now find my way to The Zen Of Sewing, but frankly I’ll settle for not wanting to hurl its not inconsiderable bulk out of the nearest window. I have a bag which is nearly finished – it’s been waiting for the return of the beast for about three weeks – and wants only four straight seams. D’you think I’ll manage it without some form of homicide taking place?

I’ve been thinking of establishing myself a regular crafty slot, and now that I think about it, Thursday evenings seems like a good plan. I don’t get very much time in the house on my own, as it were (the small girl having gone to bed just before seven, as is her wont), and as afternoon snoozes seem to be a bit hit-and-miss these days, I think that evenings are probably a better option, not least as I quite like a bit of time on my own and am thus in a positive frame of mind at the very outset, which is in itself a useful thing when I find myself confronted by a) my own technical ineptitude, and b) that recurrent desire to hurl said machine forth. So, we shall see; now I’ve said the whole regular bit, doubtless Quercus will have a drought of rehearsal time, and I’ll forget all about it until the next time I’m feeling particularly batshit.

In other news, in a moment of spectacular magnanimity the uncharacteristic nature of which those who know me personally will attest in the strongest terms, I have given the caravan’s owner (let us call him Jules, for that is… his name) another week’s grace in the ongoing saga of its removal (or lack thereof) from our garden. His girlfriend, the not-very-lovely one from the phone conversation the other week, has just had their baby, and he was proposing to come here (a five-hour drive for him) in order to, well, generally prat about in an attempt to formulate Plan B for its removal. Plan B is needed because Plan A was to get David to move it, and, as regular readers will know, that doesn’t seem to be on the cards given that he doesn’t reply to our emails or phone calls these days, and seems to wish that a large rock would appear just for the very purpose of our crawling beneath it and remaining there for a goodly period of time. Sadly (for him), said rock is about as keen on making an appearance as he himself is, so we persist. Anyway, I don’t want to be the utter trout who insists that Jules leaves his new baby and his recently-given-birth partner to drive all the way over here and attempt to clear up this situation, so we’ve left it until next weekend, with the solemn vow that then, It Shall Be Moved.

My.

Right. Knitting calls, as does the sewing machine, and, to my shame, an online episode of something terrible. Oh, but just before I go, let me gloat about this year’s foray into seasonal crafty whatsits: coloured eggs. I’ve never done these before, but have often seen them on blogs and thought how lovely they looked, so this was the year. Ye gods, blowing eggs requires some determination. I think it’s the sort of thing I’ll do again, though, as I quite like the idea of building up a collection of eggs over the years. (Assuming they last that long!) Have you tried this, and if so, what did you use for colours? For us, it was leftover food colouring from making L-Q-S‘s pumpkin birthday cake, some white crayon and a rubber band, together with some water and some vinegar. We never managed to get the green colouring to come out green, though – it always ended up bright turquoise.

And how is the internets tonight?

Well, technically, that should take the form of a question, really, which is where I hope that the wonders of the internets will kick in. Yesterday afternoon, the small girl and I, armed with a large bowl of hot soapy water and myriad balls of coloured roving, sat down to make some felt balls. (Much to my intense amusement, this caused the shrieking of ‘fat bells! fat bells!’ on the part of a certain diminutive person of my acquaintance, all the way down the stairs from the big bed where we had slept, all the way through the sitting room and past the previously-sleeping cats, and all the way around the kitchen as I got bits and bobs ready for us.) We have some gorgeous 100% wool roving dyed with natural dyes, thanks to a trip to the Yarner Trust‘s Christmas fair back at the start of December of last year, and by gum, we are not afraid to use them.

Well.

Hum.

‘Fear’ is, of course, not quite the right word, but I confess that ‘trepidation’ might do rather well. For it seems that I am a bit crap at felting, dear reader: we took little chunks of the roving (and in some cases, rather large chunks may have been bandied about before making their way to the cats’ tails), we dutifully dunked, and rolled, and pressed, and dunked, and rolled, and whatnot, and finally I ended up putting them in some old tights, separated by rubber bands, and washing them in with a load of towels, to try to finish them off. The instructions we were following said that they would begin to sort of firm up, and the edges would be less woolly, and lo! there would be felt balls (or fat bells, depending). And… there were, sort of. But the edges are a bit wonky, and there are sticky-out bits which beg to be pulled at which speak of a short future and then lots of fluff. Where am I going wrong?

The other part of the project went quite well, though – I have long hankered after making my own felted dreads for hair-wearing usage, rather than buying the hair-band variety you get in pleasantly rainbow-coloured shops specialising in patchouli and patchwork, and with this in mind, I bought a few strands of rather lovely Colinette yarn (the name of which escapes me, but it’s gorgeous dark shades of blue with the odd flash of bright green, pink, red and yellow; I know – it sounds repugnant, but honestly it’s divine) and set about it with the water and the rubbing and whatnot, and this morning I sallied forth wearing said dready hairband thing in the birds’ nest I once called my hair. Verily, I am much pleased with it. The only thing is that next time I might twine two threads together to make the resulting felt a little more standy-uppy of its own accord; the chaotic works so well in this context, I find, and it does answer at least some of my brain’s constant demands for dreadlocks (a desire I have yet to resolve one way or the other; I still love dreads, and every time I see someone with them I think ‘oooh yes’, but then I think of the messy roots which seem inevitable, and I still have concerns about the whole washing issue… and on wears the long day).

(I now realise that this post would make a lot more sense with pictures, and will endeavour, small-teething-person permitting, to rectify this sad oversight this very afternoon.)

So, lovely readers, has anyone out there got any tips on how to improve my fat bells, please? I’d like to make a large jar of them, some multi-coloured, some single, as one of the small girl’s birthday presents (she will be two – TWO! – on June 1; where has the time gone?), but these first efforts aren’t terribly toddler-proof, and being me, and thus utterly poxy, I like to do things properly or not at all. Suggestions in’t comments box, please.

When my GP told me I could two and a half weeks off work because I was blatantly ill and exhausted, I felt like I’d been given the best present in the world: time. Time is what I always seem short of, these days – time to sleep, time to catch up on avoiding midden-esque status house-wise, time to give the small girl the sort of childhood I so want her to have (insert sickening images of wheat fields and kites, conkers and bonfires etc.) time to give Quercus the chance to finish work on various bits of renovation or construction, time to let him sleep, time to be awake and active and fun for the small girl, time to make dinner, to try to remember that if I look hard, I have still got a creative bone in my body. Time, in short, to do anything except wish I had more time.

Yet here I am, on the other side, and I feel as if I’m back at square one.

Of course, it’s all too predictable – I set myself sort of targets, when given any chunk of time; things which I will get done in that time, states of mind to which I will move in that time, levels of cleanliness or completion which will be achieved in that time. And then, if I don’t manage all of those states, I feel a bit rubbish about it, if I’m honest, which is about where I am now. I ended up having not two but three weeks off, which, added to the leave I’d already booked from work, means I’ve had about a month of freer time than normal. The things I really wanted to do were to see if Quercus going into the small girl at night would rejig our blatantly-not-working-yet-we-keep-doing-it-because-we-can’t-think-of-anything-else approach to her night-time wakings; we managed about a week of this (and it did seem to be helping; she goes back to sleep much more easily for him, and doesn’t expect feeds, of course, from the paternal bosom in the way which she – naturally enough – does from the maternal alternative) before she caught something horrible at a toddler group, and I simply hadn’t the heart to leave her to her daddy’s tender mercies (no matter how tender they truly are), when I knew that a feed and a cuddle from her mama would sort her out much more rapidly in this instance. So, cue a return to the original pattern – up a couple of times each night, much wailing if feeds were not offered, much knackeredness during the day on my part.

Then of course I caught the infection thing too – cue third course of antibiotics this year (and yes, I know they’re not very good for you, but I can’t see I have much choice, given that my immune system seems to be immune to nothing except a hard day’s work).

So, I went to Quercus’s mother, to escape the situation with the kitchen here (no work surfaces, constant dust and noise while Quercus worked his arse off to get the rest of the cupboards finished and fitted, over a very long period if working child-friendly hours) and to give him a decent working day which didn’t have to stop at five-thirty for the small girl’s tea and bedtime wind-down. And then the small girl had a bad bout of teething, and we got even less sleep, together with the normal frustrations of being away from home, under the weather, crabby and surrounded by constant – if well-meant and caring – twittering (and I mean that in its original sense).

So, here I am today. The kitchen is all but finished, which is a very good thing, but I am struggling once more with the constant sleep deprivation. The small girl is getting over whatever it is that she’s been fighting off, but is still a bit pathetic, and the normal activities I’d go for when she’s a bit listless but doesn’t really want to go out aren’t really on the cards because the worktops are covered in tung oil and thus not fit for small bottoms to sit on while baking is undertaken.

Part of me knows it’s rubbish to assess myself by standards of What I Have Done With This Time. I have read Naomi Stadlen’s excellent What Mothers Do, and I believe it wholeheartedly. Wholeheartedly. Except when applying it to myself, it appears. I so, so, so hoped that this time would just let me feel caught up. That the small girl would just sleep through the night on her own, without needing a parental nudge in that direction. That I would spend mornings in happy child-related chaos, and afternoons quietly knitting while the babe snoozed upstairs. This appears to be the day of mourning for the Month That Never Was.

The plus side:

The kitchen is so nearly done. There are cupboards, and I am putting things in them. The attic is half-empty as a result, as are the sheds.

I finished the small girl’s cardigan, and have started a second.

I bought lots of lovely beads and buttons at a shop in West Sussex while staying with Quercus’s mother; these are both playthings for the small girl, and objectively justifiable as crafty bits for me, which gets them extra points.

The not-quite-so-plus:

I’m still knackered, and I’m unutterably sad about it. I feel that this constant tiredness casts a shadow over what is in many ways the best (if hardest-work-requiring) time of my life. And I just don’t know what to do about it.

Tomorrow I go back to work. I’m dreading it, not because I loathe my job, but because, after a month of absence, people will probably ask how I’m doing, and, mostly if people ask that sort of thing, I cry, at the moment. I don’t want to do that. I also don’t feel ready to go back to that sense of treadmill which dominates the week when I’m too tired to be doing the things I have to do; it doesn’t take much for things to feel fine, but likewise, a few bad nights and I’m struggling.

I’m hoping that I just need to get a grip, and that, once the kitchen is genuinely finished, things will seem brighter. There is a list of things I need to do – tax-related stuff because of self-employed work, some copy-editing, booking the cats’ vaccinations – which is genuinely so daunting at the moment that I am employing tactics I developed during particularly  black patches on the PhD, evasion ploys which allow me to push unwanted information to one side, pigheadedly ignoring it until my mind thinks it might cope with it. The funny thing is, if I read someone else writing this sort of thing, I’d probably be saying ‘get some help! you clearly need it!’, but I still feel that this will pass, and I will be OK, and we will get there, and all the other things one normally chants at moments like this.

Ugh, in short. I think it’s time for some Earl Grey.