Today is the autumn equinox, and we have spent the afternoon picking blackberries in the warmth of unexpected sunshine, with the drone of tractors ploughing the field behind our house. It never ceases to amaze me, the difference that a bit of sunshine can make, coupled with achieving a few things, albeit small things. Somehow, quietly, this week has turned around: there are now seven gallons of wine fermenting on the back of the counters, their quiet glugging a fascination to the smallest member of the Earthenhousehold, and two pints of crabapple cordial are sitting in the fridge, accompanied by a pint of sloe and apple. Apple crumbles have been baked, and pounds and pounds of apples, crabapples, sloes and blackberries have been picked. Pictures have been drawn on the chalkboard, messages have been left for small people using magnetic letters on the fridge, paintings have been done, play-dough snails have been made. Nappies have been washed, dried in the clever north wind and brought in smelling of woodsmoke. The chimney has been swept in preparation for the colder days to come, and the wood shelter is fully stacked.

I breathe out.

Yesterday evening, Quercus went to a rehearsal of the orchestra he plays for, and really enjoyed it. His orchestra is playing Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’, which he loves.

Yesterday evening, I did very little beyond knitting a few more rows of the small girl’s winter cardigan (a beautiful berry-coloured wool which was part of the stash of wool I inherited from my mother, thus giving me an extra sense of autumnal nostalgia as I use it).

Yesterday evening, my elder girl was asleep at seven o’clock, having been friendly, chatty and helpful all afternoon.

Yesterday evening, my younger girl, stil so very little, was asleep not long after, having slept deeply and restfully three times during the day, in her basket on the counter in the kitchen (she may not have been born in the kitchen, which is where I thought I’d labour, but she is certainly spending most of her time in there!); she stayed fast asleep until just gone midnight, her first stretch of five hours.

The wheel turns, and with it, life moves on.

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?

So far this month, I haz mostly bin:

:: getting to know our second-born

:: marvelling at pumpkins ripening unseen under vast swathes of foliage

:: trying to work out just how the devil my dreadlocks, never particularly tidy, have achieved this level of chaos, almost without me noticing, and wondering if they will ever reach equilibrium (without a lot of attention, something for which I haven’t really got time at the moment)

:: painting doors outside in the early September sunshine (which is to say that I have been, er, facilitating said painting by relieving Quercus of the care of small children. Ahem.)

:: discovering (and this one is no laughing matter) that I am married to a poncho-wearer. Ye gods. And you think you know someone…

And you?

Still here. Still delighted. Quite tired, though, and struggling to find time for the ol’ interwebs. Back shortly, though. With added crabapple jelly and just a smidgin of quince wine. Oh, and the odd predictable baby pic, probably.

How are you all?

This babe put in its appearance yesterday at 10.00 after a ridiculously short and straightforward labour, at home, completely drug-free. She weighs 7lb 12 for those of you who are statistically minded, and is absolutely lovely. And so, to bed.

Still here. Still pregnant. House mainly fixed. Baby clearly tardy. Best laid plans and all that.

You?

Right now, I am:

• listening to Thievery Corporation’s latest offering and loving it

• wondering how the small girl will manage at her grandma’s for a few days; Quercus is driving her over as I write this, for her first solo stay. She’s excited – helped to pack her things and was literally bouncing with enthusiasm come departure time – and I so hope that carries her through any mama-orientated wobbles

• immensely grateful that we have this as an option; Quercus and I haven’t spent any time together on our own for the better part of three years, and while the odd evening out has been managed here and there, the notion of several days is simply unreal, even if those days will be filled with limewashing…

• inhaling the scent of a particularly lovely sort of Nag Champa incense picked up by the small girl in Firkins, a long-term favourite shop in Exeter

• watching the corn turn golden in the field behind the house; it really is summer, then, despite rumours to the contrary…

• thinking of the crafty things I can do in the next few days if the small girl is happy with her grandma – so far, the list includes a bag for her to take to playschool (she’s been going for a morning a week, and seems, with the odd wobble, to be enjoying it, which has been very good for maternal energy levels when she gets back…!), a small quilt for the impending baby, some more trousers for the small girl, whose legs are growingly ridiculously fast, it seems, and possibly the shortening of my Storchenwiege sling.

• marvelling at the notion – quite ridiculous! – that this baby is less than two weeks away, universe permitting.

And 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.

:: the wildflowers we sowed this spring flowering

:: the size of those poppies

:: the fact that I’m not the only one who appreciates waist-high flowering bedlam

:: skies like this

:: small girl exhaustion after a happy morning at the village playschool (why is it more often called pre-school these days I wonder?)

:: having a garden to sow things in (today: leaf beet, amaranths, Italian parsley and basil)

:: having a lathed ceiling, complete with the first coat of lime plaster on it (though if it could see its way clear to bloody well drying now that would be good – it’s taken twice as long as we’d hoped courtesy of wet dank weather…)

:: having a bedroom which no longer looks like a construction project (it’s definitely back to being a room, even if it’s a room involving wet plaster and bare floorboards; let’s just hope the rest of the plaster coats dry more rapidly… We’re really down to the line here on timing – five weeks to go until this baby is due to arrive…)

:: beech woods and being able to actually walk a half-mile with the small girl, courtesy of a McTimoney chiropractor who (against my expectations, I confess) appears to have reversed to a large degree the SPD I’ve been feeling since week fifteen of this pregnancy

And finally,

:: the news that, contrary to the scare-mongering conference I had with an obstetric registrar who implied (as ever, it seems to me) that I am reckless and badly-informed in my plans to have this baby at home (and who told me that my midwife was very worried about my lack of growth and under-sized fundal height measurement), the baby who is actually in there, doing its thing, is now reckoned to be about 4lb 15oz, if ultrasound is anything to go by

:: the feeling that, unlike last time, where things like this would really have scared me, this is just box-ticking (a sentiment echoed by my supposedly very worried midwife).

And you?

(Format pinched shamelessly from Claire.)

Right now, I am:

• feeling profoundly grateful for the sanity which an afternoon with friends can bring.

• watching the dark grey storm clouds circle around as a north wind blows yet more rain our way; after stupidly long without any rain, really, at all, though, this feels nice, and I’ve always been a sweater person…

• summoning up the enthusiasm and concentration needed to finish a hat, which requires grafting instead of casting off, after hoarding the wool used for about, oh, five years.

• pleased with the planting we’ve managed in this, the first year of our garden’s existence. So far, perpetual spinach, rainbow chard, beans, courgettes, pumpkins large (lantern-style) and small (a particularly lovely variety called Hooligan, which produces small but supremely tasty fruit which work very well when roasted), tomatoes, basil, blackcurrants, strawberries, rhubarb, chicory, red cabbage and leeks. Most of these were something of a surprise; our beds are filled with manure, for the most part, and heavy clay, so we weren’t expecting too much this year, but the spinachy things seem to be doing pretty well, and for the rest, well, we’ll see.

• marvelling yet again at how fast second pregnancies go – this week marks thirty-three weeks of forty… More marvelling is also brought to you by the fact that I am still wearing ordinary jeans and, at least in large sweaters, could be just a greedy pie-eater when seen side-on.

• listening to the marvellous Gotan Project, and imagining future time spent buggering about in the south of France, of which I have very happy memories, from a time (shortly after my mother died) when I least looked for them. (For a few years after she died, the aged parent and I used to spend the better part of a month in the summer trolling around various parts of France. They were, against the odds, very happy days.)

• looking forward to the days to come, when we’re not all higgledy-piggledy in the midst of downstairs living, and can rediscover the joys of going upstairs to bed.

• thankful that the small girl’s room is now plastered, and we’re just waiting for the lime to go off before we can get on with the easy bit – three coats of limewash, with linseed oil added to help it not to dust, in a rather nice natural umber colour, courtesy of earth pigmentation.

• providing tea, cake, gratitude and a continuous line in terrible jokes and spectator-sport yawns for the people who have been kind enough to come and help us in our bid to get our bedroom ceiling re-lathed by Monday, no small feat. Should we succeed, the plasterer is booked for Monday morning, with Quercus labouring for him, and the idea is that the first coat of plaster will be done in that day. That’s ceiling only; lime plastering is not the rapid task which you may know from gypsum encounters, but hopefully we are treating the house with the sympathy it should have had previously, and this should mean improvements in the damp which has plagued it for years, and in the dust, which has become increasingly noticeable as the plasterwork has deteriorated. We’re looking at three coats of plaster where the building is back to the bare cob, and probably two for the rest, so it’s going to be a close run, but hopefully mid-July may see us limewashing our own room. This is an amazing thought.

And you?

You know how some days, life just feels rather shite-like, and you wish you could crawl under a sizeable rock and just stay there until everyone stops wanting something from you and it’s quiet and you can just do what you like, quietly, with alcohol and a gentle rocking motion? Yes, well, that has been a large portion of today, somehow. It started with a wet (big) bed and a child who thought this tremendous fun, and it ended with a shouty mama who just felt done: done with being patient, done with making light of it all, done with keeping it in perspective, whatever ‘it’ might be, done with being reasonable. So, there was shouting, and dramatic sweeping-out-of-roomness, and tears, and despair, and tiredness, and the constant wondering if we haven’t just done something completely insane and utterly defeating in deciding to prolong this particular brand of agony with another infant.

But.

After the tears were wiped away, and there had been an hour’s sleep in the big bed (which, only minutes before, had become forbidden territory ‘full stop!’), and some cake had been eaten, and some chai had been drunk, and some moaning had taken place, and some hugs had been given, the sun came out from the clouds and Quercus stopped looking at me as if I might bite at any moment.

Being a gentle parent, who listens without pestering, who gives space for my child to just be, who offers suggestions but not strictures, is something to which I aspire. As the child of a very consequences-driven father whose approach was almost Victorian, I know only too well how that set-up works, and it’s not something I want for our family, or for myself as a parent. I don’t want my child to do as I ask because he/she/it is afraid of me, but because they can see that I’m being reasonable, and that the chances are that I wouldn’t ask otherwise. I want he/she/it to feel able to talk to me, without thinking I’ll jump on them, and without worrying that I’ll belittle their feelings, be they ever so daft in nature. I prefer to wait those few extra minutes while the small girl finishes what she’s doing, rather than expecting her to hop to it when I command her to do so. I prefer to reason with her, and point out the pros and cons of various choices rather than just issuing directives. I value co-operation, and talking, and listening, and dwelling on the positive.

For the most part, I think I do OK, but sometimes, the anger that wells up in me scares even me. This pregnancy has certainly made life interesting. I worry about this. (Astonishing, no?) I feel that the second baby is getting a very second-rate experience – no hours of meditation spent imagining positive birth situations, no pregnancy yoga classes, no active birth sessions – and that the small girl is copping the flak of my flaring hormones and resulting bad moods. I am grumpy because the pelvic girdle pain, while manageable, is a constant presence these days, and somehow, in the space of only a few months, has assumed such a confident aspect that I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t feel like this. (I should add that I’m seeing a McTimoney chiropractor who has made me wonder if there might be room for it to improve; after the second session, I had nearly an hour of pain-free pottering in the garden, which was like sunshine after a thunderstorm.) And I snap because I’m grumpy, even though I know that doing so will only make the situation worse, will push buttons that I – and everyone else! – would really rather not push, meaning that the crying will last longer, the demands will escalate, the crisis will blacken, for lo! the Armageddon is nigh, and it is Mama-shaped.

At the moment, two things are making me work very hard. The first is broken nights, which continue to be the majority for us. The small girl has never been particularly consistent in her sleep patterns, and while sometimes I am zen about this, and can see that when she’s fourteen I’ll probably be using a pitch-fork to get her out of her pit, these days are proving extra-challenging. It doesn’t help that, despite his best efforts, Quercus remains generally unacceptable at night. It is me who must tuck the quilt in, administer that last kiss, move that hot-water bottle, or reposition the squirrel, and Quercus entering the room only seems to enrage the beast, causing screaming so horrendous that it just doesn’t seem worth it to even go there, really. We have had sessions where we switched for a few weeks, enduring the screaming in a bid to get to the other side and there find sleep nirvana, but as the time goes by and we are floored by the need for sleep and the knowledge that having only one parent on night-duty 100% of the time is just not workable, bit by bit, I end up going in at night and then before you know it, we’re back at square one, and Night-time Daddy Is Evil. I become generous in my sleep-drunk state – having had unbroken nights, I forget the frustrations, and muster myself to respond, and then we end up in the same cycle once again.

I don’t know how this will work when the new baby appears in August, and, to be honest, I tremble slightly to think of it. Things must – and will – change, somehow, but I had so hoped that they would simply have shifted by now, that more nights than not would be unbroken.

The second thing that is causing me frustration is the wet knickers of woe. The small girl learned how to use the toilet with very little prompting at about twenty-eight months. It seemed very easy; there were a few puddles, but mostly she told us the deal and we helped and all was well with the world. Until about, oh, December of last year, when there were increasing puddles and no mention was made of impending disaster, until I found we were at four or five changes of clothes a day. It’s not that bad now by any means, but today’s bed-wetting incident, which took place ‘because I was busy’, is far from atypical, and just drives me absolutely bat-shit. I know that getting cross doesn’t help. I know that retreating to nappies is an option, though not one I’m keen to try. I know that this too shall pass.

But sometimes, I am SO READY FOR IT TO PASS ALREADY.

I think that I need to learn not to feel terrible about feeling terrible. I am cross, sometimes. I am unreasonable. I am bad-tempered, resentful and self-pitying. But then how is this girl to learn the strength of my love for her if she remains unaware that, at times, it is tempered by bloody hard work and the need to keep on keeping on? I hope that she sees my anger for what it is: a transitory reaction, part of the range of normal human emotions which must be dealt with, both as the recipient and as the, er, feeler.

It is not all bloody. It just does a good impression sometimes. And that is OK. This too shall pass.

(Random pictures to remind me of the good bits, incidentally.)

Right now, I am:

• dealing with the news, from our new vet, that Wixon, our four-year-old rescue cat, is probably going to lose an eye and most of his teeth due to a combination of the feline herpes and gingivitis, despite our previous vet assuring us that he wasn’t in pain and that his teeth, while not great, were not a major cause for concern just last month.

• contemplating the number of major organs which will need to be sold to foot the vet’s bill.

• worrying that our plasterer is going to need to pick up his now-three-weeks-to-plaster-the-small-girl’s-room pace, given that he has the landing and our bedroom, which currently has no ceiling, still to go (Quercus is reinstating the ceiling, I hasten to add, rather than the aforementioned plasterer).

• wondering if the small girl will sleep better tonight; two nights of very broken sleep followed by mornings starting with a six and a five have not helped the familial mood…

• triumphing over the grubby microwave with lemon juice and steam.

• realising that the oven, rather more significant in size and grub, is still to come…

• delighting in the wildflower meadow area we’ve created at the bottom of the garden; cornflowers, poppies, daisies, all jumbled together in a chaos of willowy grasses.

• marvelling that today marks thirty-two weeks of this pregnancy. Where did that time go? (And did it take my needle case with it? When you need a bodkin, nothing else will do, really, will it?)

• finishing the first knitted thing I’ve made this new child, a hat similar in style to the small girl’s Noro berry-coloured creation, which she’s worn for two winters so far. (Or, rather, I would be finishing it if I could find the sodding bodkin! This is what happens when the furniture from your downstairs fucks off to live in storage.)

• remembering, just about, to breathe.

Today is the small girl’s third birthday, and, as such, has consisted mostly of gingerish cake (by request; recipe to follow as it’s rather splendid and it’s been fucking ages since I actually bothered to post something foodish) and sand. She has a new Quercus-made sandpit which is rather splendid too, together with a felt play mat which I’ve been working on for about three weeks (my fingers have been needle-felted most effectively in that time, and I’ve also discovered that felting needles are quite good for tidying up dreadlocks) (because obviously neatness is your first consideration with dreads), a zillion wooden animals and a beautiful wolf puppet from her grandma, who has accompanied her to bed tonight. Not for her the Riding Hood end of the spectrum; oh no – she would rather have the wolf, and ‘a bad wolf! with teefs!’ at that.

I am feeling super-lucky, and really rather happy.

Oh, and tomorrow, more plasterwork will be happening in the small girl’s room. At this rate, there is a distinct risk that we may move back upstairs before the middle of July, at which point the house will seem ENORMOUS.

(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?