Right now I am:

• listening to the hum of the oven as dinner approaches

• watching Quercus move rhubarb into its new home IN THE GARDEN! Did I mention that we have a garden now?

• marvelling at the dust created by renovation work

• wondering if there is such a thing as a decent vacuum cleaner, or if the common denominator, rather than their shittery, is us

• weighing up the pros and cons of stopping work at twenty-eight weeks pregnant (which is a whole nother post in itself, I suppose, but the long and short = SPD – the git which keeps giving)

• throwing my hat up at a night without the small girl waking, after about a month of trotting between rooms several times each night

• loving the emergence of the upstairs of our house from years of neglect, cobwebs, loose thatch and all

• looking forward to freezing meals in our new chest freezer, which liveth in the workshop, for when the new baby arrives

• thanking the universe that I have Quercus, whose capability and enthusiasm never cease to amaze me.

And you?

Hello. Quercus here, hijacking for a short while. It’s been a hell of a day, and one in which the bad has happened, I believe, in order to offset the good!

The bad. Earthenwitch managed to pilot her vehicle rather too close to someone’s shiny great Merc in a supermarket car park; in fact, she piloted it not just close to it, but actually into it. Oh dear. Fortunately the woman was as nice about it as one could be, but it’s still a complete bummer. Also, the Witchling has been giving it some stick today in the usual 2 year-old ways, namely through the unnecessarily prolonged misuse of both lungs and bladder.

However…

The good. The roof is not going to fall down after all! The previous post from Earthenwitch did not, I feel, fully express the rather dire situation we found ourselves in earlier in the week. In fact, I must admit to having played it down rather to my really quite pregnant wife at the time, in order to aid her in keeping what little sanity she still possesses, while inwardly going “shitshitshitshitshitshitshit”.

The roof, it was bad. Very bad. Our abode is not a whacking great farmhouse, coming with jolly 9″ X 9″ chunks of oak in the roof, ready to last a millenium. Rather, it is a peasant’s cottage built with materials from the garden and surrounding fields and hedgerows. Consequently, the timbers used in the construction of the roof are considerably less solid than I would choose to use for the construction of, for instance, a largeish shed. They are poles cut from small trees – round, roughly straight pieces of ash no more than 10′ long and at the absolute largest 4″ in diameter; about the same as a man’s hand. Some are under 2″ – more like a broom handle than anything. These are heavily woodwormed, and really quite bowed and bent from hundreds of years of carrying the weight of the thatch above. In places some have broken in two, leaving the thatch to fall down, and in other places they have become too short when the back wall of the house moved back half a foot at the top, and have been fixed simply by nailing some very small timbers onto them.

Worst of all was the broken A frame. There are two of these in the roof, and the one at the end where I took down the ceiling last week looked like this. Side the first:

Screwed, right? And T’other side:

Really quite buggered where it joins the purlin, I think you’ll agree? Replacement was out of the question, as to do so would mean taking the thatch off, so reinforcement was the order of the day. With the arrival of Samwise the Builder, a highly capable young chap who is trying to get his own construction company off the ground, it went something like this… A cunning larch arch was fastened to next to the old timbers. The angle is lower due to the position of the purlins, which transferred weight to the old timbers and caused them to fail:

The larch will end up being clad in something prettier. Then a tie was added. You can see one end of it here – this will show when the room is finished, so I chose an old piece of 6″ X 3″ pine which I rescued along with several trailer-loads of other roof timbers from an old house in a nearby town. Note that the old, white-painted tie-beam has been knocked out, and the new-old pine beam is much higher (6′ 6″ from the floor):

Then we reinforced the diagonals along the hipped end of the roof. You can see the join here. These timbers will show too in between the plasterwork. Not a great photo, but it’ll end up looking a bit tent-like in a kind of structural way. The diagonal timbers will get chocked out to support some of the older timbers higher up at this end:

The other side of the roof, away from the hipped end, will also get padded out with some new(ish) timbers, so there will possibly be more exposed woodwork in the rest of the room. The end result will be a room with a much higher (vaulted) ceiling, which is structurally sound and rather nicer to look at than what was there before.

Other than that, today has seen some stripping in the landing (hello ladies!) and a bit of belt sanding on the Witchling’s door.

And now I’m off to eat curry.

This morning Quercus took down the ceiling in our bedroom. It’s been gradually descending ever since we moved here in 2005, and we have always known that a good portion of the original house would need replastering at some point; given our impending arrival in August, now seems like a good time to stop large chunks of plasterwork falling down on one’s head… So…

You can probably just make out the rather haphazard nature of the beams – most of them are roundwood poles of a not-very-large diameter, and several of the ones designed to keep the thatch up have either disintegrated at some point, or simply come away from their proper place, meaning that the thatch has fallen in in places. Not so that you can tell from the outside, but obviously rather more than one would like. This means that quite a lot of new timber will be needed for the ceiling; some to reinforce the existing bits, and some to replace those which have just…. disappeared. Bracing is the way forward, methinks. It’s amazing, looking at pieces of wood which may quite probably have been up in that ceiling for really rather a long time; back when we fitted the stove, I felt definite shivers when we found fingerprints in the cob, fingerprints probably made by the people who built this house originally, back some time in the seventeenth century – well, the ceiling has probably had work done on it since then, but the original timbers are almost certainly just that: original.

We’re revisiting the concept of the family bed, too. Largely because the room we’ve shoe-horned our bed into while our bedroom is out of use is, well, about the size of said bed. There is a gap of six inches to one side, and enough room to walk past the end, and that’s about it (along with the mankiest door in the house; it fell of its hinges about two years ago, and we’ve just kept it propped open ever since, flat against the wall; I’d show you what the wall looked like behind said door if I didn’t like you so much). So, so far, our bed has been a sleeping space (for us, for the small girl, for – if they get their way – both our cats), a play area (for beads, buttons, wooden badgers, foxes, and reindeer), a picnic ground and a cinema (for me, while Quercus’s mum takes the small girl for a much-needed run around the field).

I think we’re looking at at least six weeks of sleeping downstairs. We’ve yet to move the small girl out of her room, largely because she and I are going to stay with Quercus’s mum for a few days shortly, and it seems daft to move her for a few nights. Hopefully now that the ceiling is down in our room, the rest of the preparation will be less scary; it’s mainly wall-paper stripping and then a cunning substance applied over the top to prepare the walls for a skimming of lime plaster wherever we can salvage the exisitng plasterowrk, and repairing the bits that we can’t. (Of course, I use ‘we’ here in the loosest possible sense; I shall mostly be gestating and hashing out the best way to make the small girl a felted play-scene farm mat creation for her forthcoming third birthday.)

It’s funny, but after so long spent agonising about when to do this work, and how to do it, and whether or not to do it before the baby arrives in August, it feels really good – even down to the sleeping downstairs chaos – to just get the buggery on with it.

:: vanilla muffins

:: peacock trousers made from an old skirt of my mother’s

:: Danish candle ring, acquired in Matlock (as you do) while visiting the aged parent

:: a finished kitchen!

:: and bathroom!

(Now just to find a place for the clock and a few pictures, but that sort of thing is the fun bit, I find. Less so, the cleaning of the floor.)

1. A small girl in her tent, in the garden, doing a spot of colouring.

2. A clean kitchen, for the first time in, ooh, three or more years, courtesy of a week’s hard work finishing decorating all those unfinished bits and sanding all those unsanded bits and generally getting the fuck on with it.

3. A bathroom blind fitted, despite our only onlookers being cows.

4. Multi-coloured eggs, some chocolate, some felt, some dyed, hanging on a collection of hazel twigs.

5. The Danish candle ring getting its first use, currently boasting four orange candles and wooden chick, star, daffodil and unknown flower.

6. Pizza base rising, having been made by a – largely unaided – small girl, who only ate a half-dozen raw fistfuls of it at most.

7. Röyksopp’s take on Steve Reich’s ‘Fast’, from Electric Counterpoint.

8. Finding our old dining table a new home in the garden.

9. Two washing lines filled with nearly-dry-in-a-half-hour linen.

10. A field of emerging buttercups.

And you?

So, here we are on a beautiful Monday morning, with Quercus sanding plasterwork and me pottering about while his mother takes the small girl for a run about the place. This is the week when we’re hoping to finish, finally and completely, the extension we started around the time the small girl was born, so the house looks like a bomb has hit, and there is Stuff everywhere.

Partly, we’re doing this in hopes that we might get the upstairs of the house sorted out before the new baby appears sometime in early August. It’s a bit of a tricky one, that. It’s possible that not all of the plaster upstairs needs re-doing; some of it might just be a case of taking off the awful, vinyl-like wallpaper and stabilising what’s underneath with cunning lime-related stuff, and then skimming with a thin coat of new lime. Some of the walls, certainly those downstairs, are going to need to be taken back to the bare cob, and covered up in layers of new lime to replace the crumbling mess of dust currently passing itself off as plasterwork. (We will draw a tactful veil over the plasticky wallpaper and waterproof paint which previous owners thought would be just the ticket for sorting out the damp problems.)

Anyway, the problems with doing this work are as the perpetual lack of money (with both of us working part-time so that we don’t use childcare, we’re always on the strapped end of the spectrum, and obviously impending maternity leave on my part ain’t going to benefit the coffers); the feeling that no matter how wet the day, it’s not quite rainy enough to wipe out savings; the fact that the upstairs will be uninhabitable for possibly the best part of six weeks, depending on the sort of lime we’re able to use (current favourite: a feebly hydraulic lime, which would go off in a few days, as opposed to the non-hydraulic sort traditionally used in cob buildings, which takes six to eight weeks to achieve a set which would withstand even the gentlest of prods), and our house is tiny, meaning there’s nowhere to run, really, instead, and finally, the continual lack of time from which we suffer. We both have some leave left, jobs-wise, but not enough, I fear, to finish the extension work and get the whole of this next bit done.

So, round the houses we go. At the moment, we’re hoping that the way forward is to spend the next week or so finishing off painting and general repairs in the extension, and then the Easter weekend heeling in some plants we’ve been given by various folks trying to help us out in our bid to start a proper garden this summer. (Of course, ‘heeling in’ in this instance means going and getting three trailer-loads of manure, digging over the beds [three thereof, about 6' x 8', 6' x 12', and 12' x 16'] and getting them to a less clay-like state before planting… Nothing is ever simple, is it?), and then moving on to the woodwork involved in preparing the upstairs, with a view to drafting in help sometime in mid- to late May. The help comes in the form of a friend’s recommendation, but at a cost of £180 a day, possibly, for two people. Given that we’ve not paid anyone to do anything on our house bar electrical work and having mains water connected, it goes against the whatsit, rather, to look at giving anyone this sum of money, but with sixteen weeks to go until our second baby makes an appearance, perhaps this is that rainy day… I think it probably is. It would be so nice to feel that we were going to start out with this little person with at least some of the house fixed, so that Quercus hasn’t got all four rooms to go; I’m very keen to avoid having to depart the parish for the eight-week disappearing act I had to pull with a newborn last time, and I’d also quite like to be able to see Quercus other than through a mask and a huge cloud of lime dust sometime this year… Some days I think I’m just horribly impatient; sometimes I feel that these are completely reasonable wants, and we should just fork out to accelerate our progress. I think I’m probably just tired of all our spare time – weekends, holidays, whatever – going on renovation work. Particularly as we are still pretty much habitually knackered because of the vagaries of small person night-time sleeping. I dunno, in short. But I do know that I don’t want to do what we did with our last house, which was to finish doing it up about two weeks before we exchanged contracts on it and moved. I’d like some time to just be in this house, and the longer it takes to do, the shorter the time we’ll get at the end of it, before we need more space and have to move to find it. (Our smaller bedroom is about 6′ 5″ x 10′, and will house two small people and attendant chaos at some point in the near future.)

Anyway, for now, at least, the explosion which has taken place in the house while the kitchen and bathroom contents are displaced makes any other housework pretty much impossible. How terrible.

So, I shall just have to keep going outside to gloat about the grass, and the fact that we now have something which closely resembles An Actual Garden.

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

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

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

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

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

In the making:

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

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

And you?

One day, there you are, making felted eggs, and the next thing you know, you’re on to a whole family of hen plus chicks.

And you?

It’s been a funny old month, thus far. The time I’ve not spent on this organisation/spring clean kick, I’ve mostly been trying to stop. To stop worrying; to stop cleaning; to stop moving, even. Having had persistent back-ache for about five weeks, I’ve accepted the fact that pregnancy for me is fine, provided I know my limits and I take serious, early, repetitive note. So, no long walks, no prolonged standing, minimal lifting and plenty of rest. Which sounds delightful if you can factor in the presence of full-time staff. In the real world, perhaps less-so, but still, I seem to be finding the happy medium, just about, and keeping things afloat.

I always used to think that the whole idea of pregnant people starting to nest and whatnot was probably a load of old horseshit, until I was pregnant with the small girl, when suddenly those cobwebs on the ceiling took on world-ending importance in the middle of the night and so on. This time around, it’s a little bit different in that much of the time I would otherwise have spent lamenting said cobwebs is now devoted to retrieving various garden implements from the hedge, or attempting to stop painty fingers from grabbing soft furnishings, but still, the instinct is there, nonetheless.

We now have a tidy airing cupboard for the first time in, oh, probably ever. All it took to achieve this was the realisation that space, in this case, is not the infinite place they make it out to be in Physics lectures. So, out go the old towels which can’t even remember what colour they used to be (they have now moved on in the karmic chain, to enjoy a new incarnation as wet wipes and dishcloths), out go the ancient pillow cases which were once white, out go the four zillion double quilt covers for which we have no earthly use, given that that still leaves us three doubles just in case, and hey presto! or something less trite: an airing cupboard which doesn’t bit when you open the door.

It’s also been a bit of a month for flux. The small girl has moved from her cot into a bed, in part because she said she wanted a bed of her own, and in part because encouraging that seemed like a good idea, given that the cot will hopefully see further use in the not-too-distant future courtesy of our impending arrival, and a nice gap between occupants seemed a good idea.

So, away went the cot, and in came the single bed, which is very lovely apart from the fact that its arrival caused us to realise that the small girl’s bedroom is only 6′ 5″ across, and most beds are just a couple of inches bigger than that… Which is tedious, in so many ways, not the least of which is that the only solution we could find was to jack the bed up past the skirting board to where the walls are a little wider, meaning the small girl needs a stool to get into bed. It doesn’t make for a very pleasant fall if you happen to tumble out in the night, either; so far, parental fail count: five. Five. Five times she has fallen out of bed in coming up to a fortnight. We can’t fit a straightforward rail, either, because Morpheus appears to have declared a bit of a fatwa about this whole bed situation, and this means that the fittings just don’t. Fit, that is. A trip to Ikea has helped in that we now have decent linen and a quilt the girl loves – feathers, properly snuggly, and a crocodile cycling amongst the stars were always going to be a good combination – but I am wishing that I had a spare £150 so that I could just buy an extendable bed, nice and low, which would fit the space without its tiny occupant needing an oxygen tent.

The small girl, whose name I am considering using these days if only because a nick-name seems a bit trite, really (anyone any thoughts on this? Do you blog and share? Or do you stick with no names?), has also had two days of going to bed without having a last-thing feed. She is two years and nearly ten months, and until the last few weeks has been feeding three times a day, or so: morning, naptime and then at bedtime too. As the naps have begun to taper off, the bedtimes seem to be following suit. The mornings are still going strong, for now at least. I have such mixed feelings about it, predictably. Part of me is ready for her to stop feeding – she is going to be three this summer, she seems so much more grown-up in the last few months, and I can see that she no longer needs it as she once did, although the need for the emotional connection is obviously still there – and I am twenty weeks into my second pregnancy, which has meant some discomfort from time to time… But at the same time, I still find myself saddened by the thought of this part of our relationship coming to an end. It’s been a joy, genuinely, and has given me such a powerful way to comfort, nourish and interact with her, for which I shall always be grateful.

And in amongst all this has been the usual roundelay of cooking, the odd bit of crafty whatsits (felted eggs, which were tremendous fun, and a couple of knitted cowls), the development of dreadlocks (yes, dreadlocks, again, despite my earlier attempt not going the way I’d hoped), and some fairly major landmarks for us in terms of our garden work. All of which, I find, might be fodder for another post, another day. (I want to get back to writing a bit more regularly, if only to get things down, rather than revolving them around in my head, or boring Quercus to tears with The Many Reasons Why I Need That Other Sling For This Baby). For now, curry is calling me, and it’s got a bloody loud voice.

There goes another fortnight or so where I really did mean to sit down and pour forth the usual torrent of venom, but somehow didn’t get round to it.

It is a rainy old day here in Devon, but it is made immeasurably more pleasant by two things:

Thing the First: we have a real, genuine garden path, made with real, genuine stepping stones which Quercus made. Pictures to follow when it is not pissing it down.

Thing the Second: I am working from home for three days a week as of today, because, predictably, I’m getting fairly serious SPD symptoms when sat in an office all morning and driving an hour’s round-trip to get there.

And you? Any Things of Moment on the boil?

Somehow February just sort of slipped past without me noticing, and, good or bad, no particular intentions declared themselves, other than the day-to-day sort, so let us draw a veil over that, and particularly over the last sodding week, which has mostly been coughing, worrying about small child’s coughing, and then – oh yes – a bit more coughing, interspersed with quiet triumph as the garden became gradually less broken. Of course, it being February, it did rain a fair bit, which means that our dominion over the earthly bounty is not yet complete – rotovating heavy clay in pissing rain didn’t appeal even to Quercus – but we’re well on the way, and… and WE HAVE PLANTED RASPBERRY CANES! All of our very own. Largely because Quercus’s mother brought some with her, but still – an actual plant is inhabiting our garden! And it may even have leaves! (Soon.)(Insert small but energetic monologue on the delights of seed catalogues, and on the impending over-sowing in which I am likely to indulge.)

Anyway, the wheel turns, and once again we find ourselves on the brink of spring. This year spring seems to have taken a long time to arrive. More than any year I can remember recently, this winter, or, strictly speaking, the bit of winter which comes after midwinter celebrations are nothing more than the odd stale mincepie and memories of too much stuffing, has taken a long time to shuffle on its way. I love winter; as autumn turns colder and the stars glitter as bright frost descends each night, my heart sings for the creativity I feel as I shiver in my cardigan, for the prospect of hot water bottles and steaming mugs of chai, for furry slippers (of which more anon) and warm pyjamas (preferably with owls on them). But the bit after all that, well, it’s less appealing to me, somehow, or at least it has been this year. I am genuinely looking forward to warmer days, to greenery, to LESS MUD, thankyouverymuch. The notion of having a genuine, bona fide garden? Well, that just adds to the tantalising visions of spring which suggest themselves with every ray of sun which passes the window. I am that pillock buggering about on a 9°c day with bare feet and all the windows open, just because the sun is out.

Which brings me to my intentions for March.

• Felting slippers. I has bought me a pattern, I has, and I is licking my lips with anticipation at the thought of slippers of such wondrous hues. The colours! The patterns! The potential! Anyone out there actually done this? How resilient are they? (Though I doubt I could bring myself to care, given the colours! the patterns! the colours!) (For those of you who asked about my previous slippers, they are these; I’ve had them for, oh, about four years, but the soles are worn through, the inners a dim and distant memory, and the seams are coming apart despite three fixes. I’ve loved them, but had hoped they’d see a tenth birthday, given the price-tag. Meanwhile, Quercus has had a gorgeous pair of Celtic Sheepskin slippers which lasted four years or so, and is now just about coming to the end of a brief fling with some ‘Anton’ Shepherd slippers, and they’ve lasted only about fourteen months, which, given the sum involved, is pretty rubbish. Ho hum. We are both slipper-wearers given that we have a drafty house with a slate floor for our main living space; I cannot bear most slippers, particularly on men, so I am stupidly picky, I think. But still… One must have some standards…)

• Repairing my patchwork throw. I’ve had this since I was about seventeen, when I beat a friend to it across a crowded charity shop, elbowing several venerable members of the community out of the way in the process. It’s made of curtain remnants, which makes it sound rather hideous, but the overall effect is one of shining loveliness. It’s probably about thirty now, mind you, given how long I’ve had it, and the fact that it was far from its first flush when it came to me, and is, predictably, coming apart at the seams. Some rather helpfully-sized brocade came to me from our local charity shop, and thus I must embark upon what is frankly a slightly daunting task; I’ve already fixed the blighter once, but underestimated the overlap needed to avoid embarrassing coming-apart moments… Forth Bridge, I tell you.

• Finding someone to value my bloody piano. I’ve made the decision to sell it – in fact, I’ve made the decision to sell anything which isn’t nailed down, given the direness of the financial straits which this next year will see us navigating – and now I just want to get the fuck on with it, but so far the one person I know who does this sort of thing is proving deeply unhelpful in that they don’t respond to either answerphone messages or emails, and, in two weeks, have yet to fix a time to go and appraise the piano. So, back to Google, I think. I want this ball bloody well rolling this month. Carpe whatsit and all that.

• This month, I’m going to make a real effort to remind myself that there is no deadline. I am not living some sort of test. No-one will fine me if things aren’t done when I’d thought they would be (with the exception of my tax return, which I smugly managed a full week before the deadline). Our house is not falling down (I hope…), and our garden, while not finished, will be, sometime soon. I must learn to be more zen about all this, frankly. I have spent quite a lot of time since finding I am pregnant fretting about the house, and when we’ll do the ceilings and the internal plastering, and all those other million tasks which stand between us and a declaration of ‘complete’. But… I don’t want to be so busy fretting about all this that my life slips by. I will only be pregnant (with this child!) once, and I will only spend the small girl’s third year with her once. We live through these years now, and only now, and I am learning, slowly and sometimes painfully, the value of recognising and celebrating this. So, with this in mind, this list is staying at three – oh. Ahem. Four. Four things.* The list is staying at four for this month, and this last one is the most important of all. SLOW THE FUCK DOWN, and lighten up already. Or a less American version thereof.

And you? Have you plans for world domination? Minor invasions? Major overthrows? Or just perhaps a spot of seed-planting?

* Maths was never my strong point.

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

And you?

Meanwhile… Normal life continues, in a gently reassuring manner, and once again, I’m reminding myself of all that’s right with the world by actually pulling my finger out and posting a few reminders of what is in many ways a very exciting time, in so many ways. Not least as this morning’s sixteen-week trip to the midwife was very positive: my persistently labile blood pressure behaved impeccably during a series of readings, and my midwife is happy to support our tentative plans for a homebirth!

The most marvellous sunset t’other night, complete with bright stars.

That marble sound-tree has been a thing of wondrousness. You can put blocks in to create a queue of marbles, resulting in marvellously plinketty-plonk modern music effects. Roll over Stockhausen: your crapulous days of woe are over.

The patio and indeed the outdoors indeed is more and more popular as the light increases and the days lengthen.

An impromptu butternut squash fox, as you do.

Some building porn: lots of gorgeous cob houses, and wood houses, and, well, even a paper house, and all made out of bugger-all with a budget of less than that.

Life is good, dagnammit! And you?

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

Ho hum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

•  grass-seeding;

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

•  planting a few things!

•  clearing out the greenhouse;

•  sorting a waterbutt or two for the workshop;

• plugging gaps in the hedge where necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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