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?

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, 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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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?

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?

And you?