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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Ahhh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here, in no particular order, is the list for December.

• Wrapping paper: we have stamps, we have a recipe for edible paint, we have brown wrapping paper, we have a small girl. ‘Nuff said.

• Chrimbly baking: so far, the list includes the dark solstice cake to which Antoinette introduced us, Lebkuchen, mincemeat, mince pies, jewel biscuits (those ones with broken boiled sweets which form windows when baked), possibly a gingerbread house (bastard roof collapsed, though), some (more) peppermint bark, the Aztec (?!) variant I read about t’other day while trying to work out just why it’s called bark in the first place, and probably a few things I have already forgotten.

• Two stockings. Quercus has one; the small girl has one. The smallest girl will have one, even though it won’t get much use this year, and you know what? I demand my own stocking. Thus, I shall make myself one. Yes. Indeed. And hope some blighter fills it.

• Submitting my tax return. Infamy, infamy; they’ve all got it inferme… Yes, it works better when spoken, that one, doesn’t it?

• Cream felt bunting, based on the autumnal variety in the last issue of Rhythm of the Home. We have thirty-two autumnal-coloured lanterns after a little, er, episode of craftiness which struck in November, and I’m now working on some half-sized cream ones for a more wintry feel.

• Going to see the reindeer. The farmer up the road has two reindeer which live on their farm year-round, Cinnamon and Spice. This year they are probably even big enough to look as if they could pull a, well, some sort of vehicle, even if not a sleigh.

• Mittens for the small girl. Nearly one down, one to go.

• Cast on the purple cardigan. I leave it at that.

• Window stars, as shown by the lovely Claire.

• Apple nut brittle. Oh, so very yes. We have already done a few versions of this, with the best being a honey, cranberry and spiced-berry-cordial number which was devoured in twenty-four hours.

• Boiled wool jumper for the small girl. I have four wool jumpers in the crafty cupboard begging to be made into something; two years ago, I made the small girl a pinafore dress out of a cast-off from the aged parent, and I’m itching to do likewise with a rather fetching brown job handed over by Quercus, who always roasts in wool. I’d also quite like to make a pixie bonnet for the small girl, as I made one for the smallest last night and am so tickled by how sweet she looks in it that I must inflict further examples of said confection on the world forthwith.

• Open sodding bank accounts for the girruls. (I can’t say ‘girls’ without thinking of that story about the Scottish teacher – played by Maggie Smith in the film, I think? – whose name escapes me, but whose accent does not.) Child Trust Funds. What a bag of shite. Also, Junior ISAs and the fact that you can’t transfer CTFs into them: a bigger bag of shite. Also, while I’m on a roll, banks who won’t let you open accounts without making half-hour appointments, and are then surprised that you can’t leave the children for whom you are opening said sodding accounts elsewhere for the duration of the bloody appointment. Grr. And also, bah.

• 200 words on green cleaning products as the intro to a magazine article. A page of writing on Radical Homemaking, UK-style, ditto.

I should probably leave it at that, methinks. Quite probably I won’t get even half of these things done. And you, gentle reader? What are you plotting and planning this month?

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

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

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

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

:: Eating far too much crystallised ginger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So. Here are the things I could do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:: 62 dreadlocks brushed out, 18 to go

:: A quiet house

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

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

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

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

:: An ‘Escargot’ begonia, with spiral leaves

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

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

:: Felt lanterns à la Rhthm of the Home

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

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

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

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

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

And you?