This morning in particular I found myself pondering about the many aspects of my life in which I am more than normally fortunate. Last night, the small girl slept through the night; anyone following my recent ‘woe is me!’ posts about sleep, the lack thereof, will know what this means. So, that was the first lucky bit.

The second good bit was that, had the small girl woken in the night, Quercus would have gone into her, settled her back down again, and staggered back to bed; he is a very lovely man indeed, and I am constantly delighted by how lovely he is with the aforementioned small girl. The third smug-making thing was that our morning started, as do most mornings, with me going into the small girl’s room, extracting her, warm and stretching, from her bed and returning to our big bed for a drowsy feed, which normally finishes when she breaks off and demands ’round and round!’, the cue for tickling and general baby tormenting to begin. (Though I should add that this session is probably responsible for her new bathtime behaviour – the nerve! The nerve of it! – which consists of chasing me around the bathroom shrieking ‘tickle! tickle!’ while attempting to catch MY TOES. Now that, THAT was not in the plan – !)

Fourth good thing: when I left for work, the small girl was far more interested in the idea of Quercus reading her Julia Donaldson’s excellent Tiddler than she was of me departing. Fifth thing the lucky: I get to leave work at 12.30 because our working arrangements allow us to share looking after the small girl at home, rather than using a nursery. (I do think lots of people could do this, but just don’t think of it, that said; I have colleagues earning far more than we do who express amazement at how much my husband must earn in order for this to work. Not so, my friend, not so.) Sixth thing: walking into my building at work, I could see right across Exeter, with the cathedral tower rising against a crisp and slighty misty morning, and the pale lines of Dartmoor in the background. Seventh thing: fresh coffee with crushed cardamom – gingerbread in a mug, I tell you.

And you? What’s good where you are?

* I used not to be a morning person AT ALL, but somehow these days, I really enjoy being up before everyone else. I think this process started when Quercus’s job meant that he was leaving for work at 6.30 or so; that’s probably seven years ago now, but it introduced me to the quiet of the day, when I used to sit at the kitchen table working on my MA coursework while watching the city wake up through an indecently large Georgian sash window.  Now, I look out of small-paned windows which we chose ourselves, and which are fitted into the walls of a building which Quercus built; the surroundings have changed so much, but the quiet calm of those first few moments have not.

THANK GOD THERE IS NOTHING ACADEMIC HAPPENING, THOUGH. There. I said it.

Quiet.

Lean in closer, and don’t say a word.

*whispers*

I’m contemplating trying our cloth nappies again. It’s been months since we abandoned them, and the other day I happened upon them while up in the attic, rootling my way through boxes of kitchen paraphernalia which hadn’t seen the light of day since, well, probably 2005. There they were. The nappies, that is. Not the kitchen stuff. Though that was there too, of course. Ahem. Yes. Nappies. Now, some of you may recall the succession of traumas which were visited upon us during our time as cloth-nappiers. There was the nappy rash. And then – oh – there was some more. And then? Just for fun? A bit more of that ol’ rash malarky. And did I mention the rash? And of course, accompanying the rash, there were the creams. And the liners. And the lotions. And the camomile tea-soaked wipes. And the washing-powder changes. And the white vinegar, and then the not white vinegar. And the nappy-free time, and the hourly changes.

Oh, how we laughed.

And now, BECAUSE I AM INSANE, I find myself wondering (as a good friend of mine once did regarding his intense hatred of salmon) if this time, things could be different.

Of course, it’s probably idiocy of the first order to contemplate such a step, but you know, it really galls me that we have about two hundred pounds’ worth of nappies just sitting in the sodding attic, while each week I go and buy sodding disposable nappies (albeit the ones with a sop to the eco-conscious amongst us) from the supermarket, only to chuck them into landfill a few days later. They are very convenient, I’ll admit – quick to change, slim-fitting, and easily wrapped up using their own tabs when you want to chuck them – and, thus far, they are the only thing which has meant the small girl is rash-free. She does still get sore from time to time, but not in the skin-peeling, sunburn-resembling manner we started to think might be inevitable when we were using cloth all the time.

But…

But…

BUT – ! (If you’ll forgive the pun…)

I hanker after cloth backsides again. I didn’t mind the washing rota (although they do take FOREVER TO DRY, it has to be said, and I do think that tumble driers are probably anathema when it comes to the eco-contribution the cloth nappies make), and I loved the way they looked when she was trolling about in them.

(Is it sharing too much to say that what’s prompted this longing, in part, is the decision to buy some cloth sanitary pads? [Isn't that a grim phrase, by the way? 'Sanitary pads'. Shudder. Any better alternatives will be greeted with a friendly - yet not too firm - handshake and a smal piece of flapjack, the recipe for which will follow reasonably shortly, or, at least, as soon as I finish gorging myself on the aforementioned.*] Yes, it probably is sharing too much, but hey – them’s the breaks. I think that the cloth nappy experience just made me realise how many of such pads one buys, each month, only to chuck and find you’ve run out at just the wrong time the next month. So, washable ones, given that we still use washable wipes for the small girl, seemed like a natural progression.)

Has anyone out there found that an utterly irrational improvement was found after a long break from such nappies? If so, please do let me know; there is no reason to suppose that a second go would be anything other than a repeat performance, yet still I hanker…

* Don’t even ask about the exercise/eating regimen. I’m not gorging, honestly, but the last month has been an utter joke, exercise-wise. I shall do better, and retire to flagellate myself in the meantime. Hmm. Flagellation as a form of calorie-burning. Has promise, no? No. You’re quite right. No.

Chocolate Malt Cake
Ingredients
Chocolate and malt. Ha. Had you there, didn’t I? But seriously…
2 mugs self-raising flour
2 large-ish eggs (in my case, three smallish blue ones, I think)
½ mug dark brown sugar
½ mug malt extract
¼ mug cocoa
¼ mug sunflower oil

Yes. I used mugs. Not cups. BECAUSE I AM GREEDY.

Then…
Sling the lot in a large bowl and beat the buggery out of it. Pour the resulting shiny happy mixtureness into an oiled loaf tin (or a smug-inducing silicone one which requires no such fiddling) and cook in YOUR NEW OVEN WHICH HEATS UP IN ONE NANOSECOND AND ISN’T COVERED IN A MYSTERIOUS FILM OF OIL for about forty-five minutes on 180°c.

All clear?

But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.

Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.

We are pikies. It’s simple.

Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plus side:

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

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

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

The not-quite-so-plus:

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

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

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

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

In other news, I am running away from home again. The kitchen is nearing completion, but the dust, grime and hours needed simply aren’t really working with a small girl who isn’t very well and a sleep-deprived mama, so it’s off to Quercus’s mother we go, we go, yo ho ho. Or something. This means no internets for a few days, but probably lots of knitting; I’ve finished that cardigan shown in progress in the last post, and am suitably stunned at my own wondrousness (er… ‘luck’ might be closer to the truth), so I’m now casting around for something new to knit. Current possibilities are, well, largely hat-related, although truth be told I’m a bit bored with hat-knitting; somehow I have accrued lots and lots of small quantities of very pretty wool, which means lots of small projects, really, unless I buy yet more wool, when what I really want is something more substantial. The only candidate for such an enterprise is, at the moment, a huge knot of wool which looks as if the cats had scrumbled at it for at least two weeks prior to its being forgotten in the attic for about six months. Ahem. This is rather dampening my appetite for starting, shall we say.

Hoo-ho.

And you? What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

So.

The letter that we sent recorded delivery to David, he who hath saddled us (apparently) with a caravan we don’t want, don’t own, and want gone, has come back to us – the post office attempted to deliver it, left a card saying they’d tried, and then it waited for two weeks in their depot thingy before wending its way back to us.

ARGH.

Is so annoying.

In the meantime, I’ve tried emailing David again to let him know that if we can’t raise him by post or phone, we will end up going round there, either to tackle him face to face or to find out if his landlord knows where the fuck he’s gone. It’s all so bloody unnecessary. That’s what pisses me off. It’s not like we want anything from him now – that ship sailed bloody months ago – but you’d think someone we once considered a good friend would have the decency to pass on a phone number, at least, wouldn’t you? I mean, obviously we did something to piss him off, but surely it must be clear that we’ve no idea what, and, if he ever does read this blog still, that whatever it was was inadvertent; I just can’t for the life of me work out what has happened here.

Fucking caravan.

Fucking situation.

Fucking prospect of over an hour’s drive each sodding way to see if he’s moved.

Fucking fucking fuck.

Quercus’s mother came to visit, bringing stews, casseroles and large bars of chocolate (about which I was relatively abstemious, in line with my “a little bit of everything but less than that, you greedy cow” approach to what I eat), and she babysat for us on Tuesday, so we were able to go out on our own in the evening, for the fourth time since the small girl entered our lives over twenty months ago. So, extra sleep, things to eat which I didn’t cook, and the visible nature of our progress towards a finished! kitchen! AFINISHEDKITCHEN! has meant that I am not feeling batshit any more. So far, we’ve been making the most of this breathing space by focusing our efforts on the construction of the kitchen; as you can see from the pictures, the cupboards are coming along, and shortly there will be that blissful bit where I get to put things in the cupboards, and to organise ingredients into boxes, and to shuffle things around so that the nicest mugs are at the front of the row. I so love organising cupboards; it probably says something worryingly Freudian about the way my brain works, but what can I say: it soothes my soul. And there is going to be plenty of soothing to do – our attic space, which we only gained as part of building the kitchen and bathroom, is stuffed to the gunwales with kitchen paraphernalia which we haven’t actually seen for the best part of five years, given that it was housed in the shed, all in boxes, before its recent promotion to loft living. Ahem. I have a notion that sometime soon there may be a boot sale in our future.

A knock-on effect of the kitchening is that, rather than baking, I’ve been knitting – I’m on the second of the sleeves for the small girl’s cardigan, and have finished the back and the front pieces. It’s chunky wool, so is knitting up disgustingly quickly, which is just as well, given that my patience is never exactly plentiful. I’m also finding the hardwood needles I bought for this pattern rather pleasing to work with; the yarn slides easily, but not too easily, across their gently cool points, and I rather like the twiddly turned bits at the non-business end. I’ve been fortunate with the pattern, too, which I found for free on Ravelry, and not least because some very kind and deeply knowledgeable knitters initiated me further into the bewildering world of abbreviations and slipped stitches passed over, which is to say that they translated some badly-worded pattern bits for me, and hopefully I’ll finish the cardigan over the weekend – my first actual garment which isn’t a hat or a scarf or legwarmers.

I’ve also finally managed to turn an old woollen jumper of my father’s into a felted dress for the witchling – a soft blue-grey, it felted straight off in a hot wash in the machine, and it was just a matter of cutting the bits out and stitching them together (using the antiquated sewing machine, which is going through a relatively amenable phase, the unpredictable length of which only serves to heighten my suspicions regarding its having developed a personality). I tried several times to catch a decent picture of the small girl wearing the result, but so far she’s too quick on her feet; I’m taking her repeated grins and strokes of it as an indication that she likes it, and my maternal heart was so pleased at this that it threatened to beat itself inside out. My favourite bit is the felt stars I added to the front; again, rubbish picture, but that’s what those blurry pink and yellow bits are, honest, guv.

Also a work in progress, though it never feels that way, really, is the development of the small girl’s speech. Words are positively tumbling over themselves in her haste to articulate them – three-word phrases, emphasis, repetition: we have the lot. It is such a delight to converse with her; every month that has passed has found me thinking that this is it – she cannot get any sweeter, and this is the single most sweet age that there could possibly be, in any child, at any point, and then, THEN, I find myself rethinking as the next moon changes, and something new wanders into our lives courtesy of a very determined pair of size 3 feet. Possibly while clutching a percussive instrument of some sort. (And yes, technically, and I shit you not, the ol’ Joanna counts as a percussion instrument.)

Oh, and of course it’s Valentine’s Day on Sunday. So, time for some heart-related craftiness, methinks – our tenth together. To my mind, nothing says ‘I love you’ like a lie-in, and some eggy bread on rising.

* Batshit: a term generally used to indicate maternal insanity, brought on by a combination of Not Getting Out Enough, Not Sleeping Enough, and Generally Beating Oneself Up About Perceived Maternal Failings Brought On By Points One And Two.

Also, there will be chocolate malt cake. Oh so very yes.

Ick.

And also, bums.

Update: yes, still most of the above; just a quick question, too – does anyone actually ever use the search bar? I ask because it’s just possibly going to drive me demented; finding the CSS which governs its appearance seems to demand a peculiar combination of dogged determination and a devil-may-care attitude to the passing of time – I can manage the former, but the latter is proving tricky…