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?

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?

So, this post is brought to you by the letters ‘v’, ‘o’, ‘m’, ‘i’ and – can you see where I’m going with this? Can you? – yes, that final bundle of joy, ‘t’. The trouble with playschools is that they appear to be hives of infection, veritable stashes of sickness, and yes, we have all been pole-axed by a lovely little sickness bug which is currently doing the rounds of the small girl’s playschool. Fortunately, for me, at least, it’s not been too horrible (and has certainly kick-started my desire to lose some weight, with a mighty seven-pound weight-loss in one day), but the thing that I particularly loathe about illness when you’re a parent is that you just don’t get to crawl into bed and feel sorry for yourself in the way that you want to. Oh no. You just get to do all the things you normally do, but while feeling god-awful! Ain’t life fun?

So, things that I have learned recently:

1. Failing routers are really, really boring.
2. Waiting to speak to your technical support people while they play ten-second blasts of truly terrible music at you loud enough to distort through your phone’s crappy speaker is really, really boring.
3. Second children do not always sleep more easily – and for longer – than the first.
4. Sourdough bread is much nicer than the name suggests.
5. It is possible to brush dreads out after they’ve been in for over six months, but man, it’s tedious, and hugely time-consuming.

So. That’s me. You?

So, with about two days’ notice, the aged parent came to visit. He does this, from time to time – calls up, says he’d really like to come and see us because it’s a long time until our next agreed meet-up (which normally doesn’t come to pass anyway), and are we free tomorrow? Usually we are; we don’t live the sort of life which means lots of time away from home, or with the zillions of social engagements on which he seems to thrive (or at least not the sort which doesn’t involve friends good enough to be shuffled about informally timing-wise). And then he appears, sprinkles take-away food about the place for a bit, stays for something between twelve and thirty-six hours, appears bemused by the small girl (sometimes benignly, sometimes with hints that I need to take a firmer line), before Something Comes Up At Home, and he departs, usually at least four hours before he’d said he’d leave.

Today is no exception; minor irritation is added by the fact that he hadn’t said goodbye to the small girl, and she thinks he might be there to meet her when playschool finishes at lunchtime.

Why do I expect anything from this man? When will I learn that, set against the apparently never-ending demands of his new family, I come a very firm second? (This time, his wife is not well [something which appears, in itself, to be never-ending; the woman is as clear a case of neurasthenia as I have ever seen] and his step-daughter is having yet another attempt at anorexia. I say ‘attempt’ because it seems that this happens each and every time that the light of parental affection swings from her even slightly; both his step-children seem to be utterly set on having the ENTIRE WORLD revolve around them, FOREVER; should this fail to be the case, there will be Dire Consequences.)

Yes, I’m feeling petty and childish about this – hiding it well, non?

Just once, though, it would have been nice if he could have done what he’d said he would, and just be here, just for a bit, just for long enough to get used to him being here, just to get past the bit where I feel I’m on show, and I feel nervous, and I worry what he thinks. I should know by now that it’s genuinely daft to have any expectations of him at all, that all plans are subject to change, that any agreements are superceded by things about which I don’t even know until it’s a done deal. I should also know that the constant ill health of this new family of his seems to mean a constant on-standby approach on his part, despite the fact that I would have been told to get a grip or something similar had I been similarly inclined.

I think he does mean to make an effort; he comes here, after all. But he just falls short every time. It was lovely that he came; it was lovely that he brought a toy for the small girl, and took the time to play with her, showing her how to use it. It was lovely that they went out together yesterday, and she talked to him and showed him around and so on. But it would also have been lovely if he’d waited the 90 minutes needed to say goodbye to her when she finishes at lunchtime, and if his scuttling back home didn’t feel as if it might be tinged with relief at having ticked the ‘visit daughter’ box.

I’m really rubbish at this whole ‘you can’t change other people’ bit, you know.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I am trying to start over.

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

Anyway, we shall see.

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

I’ve been away for a week’s general lazing about the place in Sussex, with Quercus’s mother. She has been getting the small girl up most days, and letting me sleep in until, well, whenever I felt like it, before providing me with cooked breakfasts, fresh juice and general freedom, the result of which is that I look about ten years younger than I did when I left, but am also slightly struggling to get going on the normal rythm now that I’m back in Devon. Partly, I’m attributing this to the reason for my departure in the first place: we’re going all out on finishing off outstanding work in the kitchen and bathroom. All those little things that had been overlooked, or never finished, or abandoned because other pressing things came to the fore, like, you know, leaking windows and render falling off the house – those are on The List at the moment. The next week should see both rooms repainted, the floor cleaned and sealed, the woodwork sanded and repainted (the gloss we used sucks big-time – under two years old and it’s noticeably yellowed; I’m contemplating eggshell this time…?), doors rehung and painted where needed, plasterwork finished and sanded, a bath replumbed and a whole host of other merriments which escape me at present.

So, the rest of the house looks like a patchwork quilt exploded on/in it – the contents of the kitchen are currently taking over most of the book/toy/general pottering room which used to be our dining room before we built the extension, and the sitting room is sort of languishing in general I’ve-just-got-back-please-unpack-me style.

But just think! A week, and then cupboard sorting! Tidying! Putting things back in place, clean, dust-free, orderly!

I know it is a bit on the tragic side, but this is one of my favourite things.

And then… the calm before the storm. For we, being reasonably intelligent and thoughtful souls, have decided to re-plaster the upstairs of our house, including taking down possibly two-hundred-year-old ceilings, by August! Woo! Clearly, in this house, nothing says ‘ill-timed renovation of a major and very dusty nature’ like ‘I’m pregnant!’. Bring on the toxic concoctions of lime-related woe! Twenty-four weeks down, sixteen to go…

In the making:

• a pair of rather appealing Moomin trousers. That is trousers of a Moomin-print-fabric nature, I hasten to add; I have as yet no actual Moomin to clothe.

• a pair of Liberty peacock print trousers, made from an old skirt of my mother’s that I found in amongst the stash of treasures Quercus’s mother is storing for that fabled and golden time ‘when the house is finished’. (I am not sure this time will ever come to pass; it has an almost Arthurian ring about it, doesn’t it? The Once and Future Furniture.

And you?

• cough, cough, cough • sniff, sniff • grumbling small stomachs • back ache from too much standing and a lot of rocking of small persons who are not very well • cement mixing • homemade stepping stones x 40 • incredibly garlicky hummus • lentil, cheese and tomato loaf • a lot of salad • a small girl who loves her grandma (thank god!) • not enough sleep • not enough fun • knit, knit, knit • ‘MAMAAAAAAA!’ • ‘You mean and horrid, Daddy.’ • again? it’s 3 A.M… • Sherlock Holmes • Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (why has she not written more books yet?) • tea in the sunshine • a cleared-out greenhouse towards which I have not lifted a finger • a clay-covered garden path • fizzy water, only drunk when pregnant • the tired-and-broke desire to spend LOTS OF MONEY on treeeeeeats • silver earrings? • why can’t I find new slippers that aren’t hideous for less than £40? • muddy pawprints • cream throws dyed brown look a lot less disreputable • the workshop now full of our things, and the borrowed garage storage now empty •

And you?

Isn’t it always the way that the weekend sees rain non-stop, and then Monday morning dawns bright and sunny?

Ho hum.

This weekend, Quercus has been trying to get back into the swing of working on our house. The current project is to get the garden work finished (as much as is seasonally possible) by the end of February; we have a block of time set aside for just this very thing, beginning on Friday, and Quercus’s mother is coming to lend an extra pair of hands, which is probably just as well given that this weekend saw me with the first twinges of a back pain suggestive of SPD.* So, Saturday was spent with the small girl and I pottering about the house, sorting out laundry (thrills! deep joy!) and house stuff, and pootling on the patio for tea-breaks with Quercus, who was otherwise engaged in making shelving for the workshop so we can get our tools and general shed paraphernalia sorted out, prior to doing more intensive work as the year goes on.

We’ve had a few weeks of not doing very much around the house, somehow. There are lots of things to do, of course, but somehow, the slump around Christmas just took a while to wear off… so that despite his having worked really hard for a week in early January, we still find ourselves with a list which includes many tasks identified quite a while ago. I think the thing is that it’s difficult to sustain a really brisk pace over a long period of time, particularly when you’re also working, living in a house which requires a lot of just ordinary cleaning and maintenance even to tread water domestically, and bringing up small children on top of that. So, from time to time we just sort of collapse into a small heap of lethargy. Well, I do, at least, and I’m not even the one doing the majority of it. (I like to think of myself as er, ahem, a facilitator.)

But as the weather improves – and we did get some sunshine on Saturday, albeit followed by gale-force winds and pissing rain – and the days lengthen, we remember that somehow, I am fifteen weeks into pregnancy, and before we know it, this whole managing-a-house-with-one-child-plus-jobs-and-renovation malarky will seem like child’s play as newborn chaos reigns and we find ourselves back on rations of sleep which are expressed in minutes with perfect validity. So, the things we’re going to do by the end of this month include:

•  laying the stepping-stone paths (we’re now thinking about using meaty cordwood rounds instead of paving slabs, simply because we can’t seem to find something we like and can afford, despite months and months of hunting) down to the bottom of the garden;

• finishing off the workshop and bringing the contents back from storage;

• rotovating what will be the lawn, which is the largest of our three terraces;

•  grass-seeding;

•  sticking in decent quantities of manure and topsoil where the new growing beds are going to be;

•  planting a few things!

•  clearing out the greenhouse;

•  sorting a waterbutt or two for the workshop;

• plugging gaps in the hedge where necessary.

This, of course, is only half the story – the other side of our garden, which is about the same size as this piece, is completely broken. It’s covered in a combination of a goodly-sized woodpile (which will one day be housed in the barn which Quercus will build for wood storage, but probably not until next year), building supplies and general crud, but we’re thinking sufficient unto the day and all that, so for this spring, it’s the kitchen garden, effectively, which we’re hoping to finish, so that we can then try to work out a way of sorting two of the four rooms in the original house. (For ‘sorting’, read ‘taking down the ceilings; stripping the walls of their crumbling plaster; working out minor details like woodwork, doorframes, cupboards, shelving; reinstating plaster, skirting boards, ceilings and so on’.)

It’s quite daunting, truth be told, and I’m struggling with the feeling of being unable to help beyond the facilitating bit. This is a bit of a recurring problem for me; I like to be in control (‘what? you!? Nooooooo.’) and not being able to be in control does not bring out the best in me. I like to make lists, and to tick things off, and to move swiftly on, and whatnot. And I just can’t, really, when it’s not me who’s doing the things on the list. And it’s not fair of me to want things to move more quickly, and I know that, and I know it’s not helping to chivvy, but oh. It is not easy to park a lifetime of twitchy must-try-harder mental habits.

So, I am hoping that Quercus and I can write a list together, so that I know what’s likely to happen when, and so that I don’t get unrealistic expectations of what might be possible. I can do things to help, of course, like making sure there is cake for a break with tea, and food for dinner which doesn’t take much thought, and enough to drink, and clean working clothes. I can ensure the small girl is happily occupied, and I can make sure that I’m eating well and taking care of myself so that I don’t enter that horribly emotional state which for me often goes with tiredness in pregnancy, meaning that Quercus can Just Get On With It without having to worry about how I’m doing, and whether I’m about to sprout snakes instead of hair. But I so so so wish that we just had pots of money, so that we could get someone to help us do this, so that we could wave a bit of a magic wand and just make some of the list go away, preferably with time enough to spare that the last months of this pregnancy might not be such a balancing act, such a divide-and-conquer approach to our time as the two adults in the house. When you’ve got limited funds, where is that point that decides you on prioritising just getting things done over keeping the small quantities of savings that you’ve accrued…? And did I mention that Quercus may be made redundant at some point in the coming months, as part of UK government cuts to the civil service? Let us not speak of that, actually – we knew that this was a possibility, and I’m hopeful that with careful management, we’ll do just fine. I prefer to be positive about these things, after all.

Friends have been talking to me since I said that I’m pregnant, telling me of the importance of networks, and of local friends upon whom one can rely for emergency childcare, cups of tea, bolt-holes. I do know this, of course, but it’s hard to cultivate these networks when you’re generally always occupied doing something, be it commuting from work or freelance editing or spending time with the small girl or debating paving slabs and heating solutions. I am trying, though, and I’m trying to find out about things like pre-school, and whether or not it is right for us, and other groups to occupy small people, and ways to manage my time which make household-running easier.

Sometimes I’d like to just be pregnant, you know? But then, does that ever happen, I wonder? Or is it just that most people seem to have children at a time in their lives when change is inevitable? Moving house, changing jobs, having other children to think about…?

So. There you go. And you? What are you up to on this (hopefully) sunny Monday morning?

* SPD – to those happy uninitiated readers, this is basically where the ol’ pregnancy hormones get a bit carried away, and your pelvis loosens, meaning that the joints aren’t terribly comfortable. Sometimes this means audible clicking, sometimes ‘just’ aches and pains. Sometimes it means hydrotherapy helps, and sometimes it means crutches. In my last pregnancy I had SPD from about 22 weeks, so it’s not particularly surprising that it may be thinking about starting a bit earlier this time. Tell you what, though: it can fuck right off.

Ohhhhh. You know how some days feel as if the edges are fraying, and you’re clutching at those threads while juggling an armful of energetic frogs all hell-bent on escaping your dubious attempts at captivity, AND you’re doing all this while walking over hot coals and reciting German verbs in all sorts of challenging and deeply un-Anglo-Saxon-seeming tenses?  Today has been one of those.

If I’m honest, it’s not so much the various miniature traumas of today that has me feeling a little beaten, though. I think it’s the cumulative effect of a few weeks or so that seem to be one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes things just seem like a bit of an uphill struggle.* The small girl is feeling quite clingy towards me at the moment, it seems; not sure why, but only I will do when it comes to a variety of ostensibly fairly superficial tasks, like, say, being helped out of the bath and got into pyjamas, or holding someone’s hand to cross a road, or being carried from our bed to her own in the evening. Part of me finds this utterly endearing; part of me dreams of a day when Quercus could do the end-to-end bath and bed routine without me necessarily being there, and without utter meltdown being the inevitable conclusion.  Of course, the irony is that it’s not so very long ago that I withdrew from a return to pottery evenings because I didn’t feel ready to let go of the small girl’s bedtimes; it’s not so much that I feel differently, now, but rather that I’d just like to have the option, I suppose.

Also, I feel constantly that if I could just get a better grip on things, life would flow more easily. Today, for example, the small girl and I came back from visiting a lovely friend and we were probably half an hour later than we normally would be for her tea. This meant, together with her not having had a snooze this afternoon for some reason that the gods of humour deemed viable, that she was pretty much done in , and not feeling at her most sociable, by the time we ate, and by bathtime, she was really at the end of her tether, not least as she was getting in the bath at about the time she’s normally heading upstairs with me for a feed and a snooze before she goes to sleep.

Oh, I know, I know. I’m tired, I’m hormonal, and I’m skint. That’s never a good combination, really, is it?

Things keeping me sane at the moment, as I trudge blearily through this week:

• David Bowie, in a variety of guises from ‘Station to Station’ to ‘Somebody Up There Likes Me’, including ‘Lady Grinning Soul’ and ‘A New Career in a New Town’

• The acquisition of some large samples of fabric, which have patchwork cushion written all over them.

• The quiet debate about dreadlocks which I’m still having with myself, this time prompted by the fact that, well, not brushing your hair for a really, really long time, together with a no-shampoo regime, does create a really quite strong tendency for dreads to form of their own accord. Ahem.

• A vaguely tidy kitchen which includes my first attempt at lime marmalade, a superbly large loaf of homemade bread courtesy of 2lb silicone moulds, and a ginger cake where ‘ginger’ = ‘dynamite strength’.

And you? What are your sanity preservers this week?

* Yes: I am officially a privileged white person living in a western country and bitching about how terrible life is despite my two-salary household (at least in theory; let us not speak of our actual salaries at the moment). I say all this, as ever, with the clear knowledge that I am being an ungrateful trout. But hey – this is my blog, innit, so I can whinge if I want to. Or something.

This weekend the aged parent came to visit. Oh, it wasn’t great. No. Wait. In lots of ways, it was fine. We talked, and he bought take-away, and came armed with wine. He cleaned the sink, and put some wallpaper up for us in the sitting room, where the dust is quite bad because the plaster is falling off the walls (we’re hoping to fix it this coming summer, by replastering the whole of the inside of the old bit of the house, so there’s just no point in doing much beyond papering over the cracks – literally! – for now).

But…

When will I learn that I won’t get what I want from him? That showing him things I have made, or written, or cooked, or tiled, or built, even, just won’t elicit the response I appear to crave, despite my outward nonchalance? And why do I crave it? I despise myself for so doing; I feel like a small dog, yip-yip-yipping as I jump up at his leg, desperate for attention. Yet time and again, I produce the quilt I have sewn (a sort of mildly bored ‘right you are’ acknowledgement being the best result here), I show the tiles I have fixed (which he hadn’t actually noticed, despite being in the room minus said tiles only a couple of months ago – regular readers will have noted that they are not exactly subtle…), I volunteer information about things I am writing or have had published only to realise that the conversation has miraculously moved on to his wife’s proofreading work, or his stepdaughter’s eating problems. Time after time after time.

Also, when will I learn that I must make my plans so that they may coincide with his, but are not dependent on them? To wit: this weekend, there was an advent fair on at a local-ish Steiner school. I had wanted to go for weeks, and had planned accordingly; I knew what time I needed to leave, and what I would do afterwards, and where we could get some lunch, and how I’d manage some sleep for the small girl, who sleeps most afternoons shortly after lunch. I had thought about the possible Chrimbly presents I might manage to buy for her, and how best to hide them from her notice if I ended up going alone with her. I told him about this fair before he said he was coming, and we agreed, when he’d arranged to visit then too, on a time at which we would need to leave. It wasn’t prohibitively early, really – 9.00. Yet 9.00 came and went. As did 9.15. And 9.30. And at 9.45, when he arrived, he strolled through the door in a leisurely manner, appearing somewhat wrong-footed by my bags-ready-let’s-go response. We got to the fair about forty minutes after it started, as a result, and, as I had feared, it was utterly beseiged. Being reasonably out of town, there was nowhere left to park, and no easy alternative. I abandoned the attempt, bit down my disappointment because I didn’t want the small girl to see it, and moved on to the rest of the day.

But when we got home and I heard him saying airily that we’d decided to give it a miss, I did feel sad, to be honest.

And when he shot off home on Monday, having spent a weekend looking rather bemusedly at the small girl as she attempted to engage him in conversation, or telling me how she ought to wash her hands before she comes to eat, I couldn’t help but feel that he rather misses the point with her. He says she is lovely, but he won’t play with her. She asks him to play with her – ‘Grandad come an’ play wiv me? Have a look a’ my toys? P’raps read a book?’ – but he’s not even interested enough to sit on the floor, preferring to sit on the sofa, not at her level, and read the paper. He couldn’t even read a book to her the one night that he did try it – he just sort of flicked through the pages while she clearly felt confused by his lack of animation. This, from the man who thinks he is good with small children.

It’s stupid, really. It hurts. It still hurts. I can predict how he will behave; I can see the hurt coming; I can warn Quercus that it’s not going to work, asking him to look after the small girl, because if she comes to expect anything from him, she will be disappointed, and I am not willing to have that happen if it is at all within my control to avoid it. I can predict the inappropriate presents – more soft toys which she doesn’t need and won’t really play with, and a cardigan both ugly and strangely-sized – despite the fact that there are, of course, lots of things I could have suggested, and which she needs.

I have learned to predict the hurtful or thoughtless things he can and will do. But still I can’t stop it hurting. I have learned the lesson, so why can’t I act on it?

Monday morning:

- Bright sunshine and hard frost.

- Small girl’s starry quilt finished in time for the first proper cold weather (pics to follow when I finish changing cameras; have I ranted recently about how much technology has pissed me off lately? Broken or useless in the last few months: microwave, kettle, toothbrush, two digital cameras, external harddrive; it’s just not funny!).

- Several new recipes to add to the stash (sweet potato and lentil burritos, butternut squash and rainbow chard lasagne, stuffed pumpkin).

- House full of clothes needing either washing, drying or putting away (why oh why have we no decent line outside? Winter sun may not be either frequent or particularly warm but it beats the hell out of dank indoor set-ups, with the exception of the wonderful Victorian airer we have on a pulley system…).

- Hair cut on Saturday and now the mirror shows me someone else; can’t do the things I normally do with it very successfully, and yet don’t like it just down… Time, I guess, will solve that one!

- Small girl has been quite cross for about a month now, and Quercus and I are definitely noticing. Teeth? Virus? Chickenpox? All considered, but nothing conclusive.

- Gingerbread forest baked on Friday; eaten by Saturday evening.

- First pieces of flat felt made, one with stripes and one with spots. Again, pictures to follow once I sort the camera issue.

- For some reason, I appear to be savagely bad-tempered lately. Not sure why; maybe I’m catching it from the small girl (or maybe she’s catching it from me). The house is really getting me down, and I long to have the spare time together that ‘normal’ people seem to get at weekends, rather than the ships-that-pass-at-mealtimes experience that our weekends normally seem to be. I know that the things we each do are valuable, in some cases vital, but that doesn’t make it easier when you get to Monday and just feel flat because the weekend was… blah. Quercus is working to finish the workshop at the moment – the cladding is nearly done, and then he’s got a door and two windows to make before he can move our vast collection of tools in – and I’ve been tidying up things like gate-painting, crack-filling, kitchen tiling and whatnot. I can see progress, and yet the rest of the house is so dusty, so cobwebby, so mouldy (in places), so chaotically full of STUFF that just won’t fit anywhere else because our storage is virtually non-existent, and all I seem to do is half-finish a job while the small girl sleeps only to break off and do something else when she wakes, because otherwise we spend ALL DAY doing housework, which doesn’t seem particularly fair on her, despite her relative patience in such scenarios. (I find she tolerates me doing things like that for a long time, but we often end up with a period of relative meltdown later in the day; it makes more sense, thus, to go for a walk together at some point, even though the laundry mountain will only mock me for such weakness.) What I need is four hands, a forty-eight-hour day, and professional help. I just never seem to be able to keep up with all the things I’m supposed to be doing, and our house is the dustiest, mouldiest place I have ever lived, so here, more than anywhere, I really want to keep things clean. (Insert mild rant about possible reasons for developing asthma here.)

So where are you this Monday morning?

So, there I was, writing myself a good listy whatsit and trundling out lots of productive and creative uses of my time. Well, so far, I have finished painting the bottom of the house, and I have filled in the French drains we’d dug (shovelling pea shingle, how I love thee), which has taken the outside of the house to a whole new level of Finished. I have also finished tiling the kitchen, though I have yet to grout.

(An aside here, and a question: coloured grout – tasteful and a good idea with handmade and thus very uneven tiles in a size-of-gap-disguising way, or just a hideous throwback to 1970s colour-schemes involving taupe? I am contemplating dark brown grout for our very multicoloured tiles [red, orange, dark brown, dark green, dark blue, duckegg blue, pea green, yellow] because I fear white might make the varying gaps necessitated by the uneven shaping of the tiles look all the more noticeable, in a Not Good way. Has anyone out there used coloured grout? Good, bad, ugly? And where did you get it? Any recommendations?)

I have also goodly painted one gate with primer, and two coats of the dark grey which we used on the external woodwork.

Oh, and I have cooked up a vast vat of quince, which I’m going to freeze in little blocks which can then be chucked in with apple pies or crumbles for exciting culinary adventures long after the quinces themselves are but a memory. Or something.

And that, my friends, is where the good stuff ends.

Mostly, other than that, I have been making needle-felted pumpkins.

Or reading Permaculture or Juno.

Or novels.

Or making lists.

Or fretting about what to make Quercus for Chrimbly. Oh, and the small girl.

Or wondering if that rash is actually chickenpox, and if that would explain the grumpiness which has marked the small girl’s days of late.

Or looking for the goblins who come into the house each night just to sprinkle dust around the place, and, you know, trash the kitchen.

Or wishing I could knit faster, because that way, the birthday gift which I wanted to send to La Que Sabe in time for her actual birthday, rather than, well, probably two weeks later,  would be finished. (Shh! I’m not saying what it is because I am still going to send said present… just shamefully late.)

No-one’s perfick, eh?