Spent a lovely sunny hour and a half at the allotment with Maggie today. She painted on cardboard, watered randomly, dug holes and spacehopped. I couldn’t dig much as the ground is like rocks (rain forecast this week though so no more excuses), but that allowed me to potter about doing some light weeding and a bit of gloating. Gloating is important.

The first early potatoes are looking jolly nice (photo).  My garlic and shallots are looking lovely too although I have just this minute read Sarah Raven’s book which tells me garlic needs a wet spring or lots of water, neither of which it has had, so we’ll see what comes out at the end. I have broad beans, Jerusalem artichokes and mixed salad coming through well, although something is nibbling my peas. All in all I have about a quarter of the land properly cleared and another quarter roughly cleared and planted with spuds. A third quarter is destined to remain carpeted for the rest of the season – I am planning to plant squashes (currently in the greenhouse and potted on today) through holes in the carpet – so that just leaves me with another quarter, currently carpeted, which I need to clear reasonably well to put tripods on for beans, cucumbers and some flowers.

And then there is The Unclearable section at the end, all sapling trees and ferocious brambles, which I am pretending I haven’t seen. I have my compost bins there but it is otherwise a no man’s land.

None of this bears any resemblance to The Plan, but that was always going to be the case.

But all in all much better than anticipated given that Maggie has been A Horror (capitals warranted) this weekend and that we were all, not unrelatedly, awake well before 6 this morning. It started rather well: I was pleased and justifiably smug to be at the allotment by 9.30, hoeing and planting spuds, having already dropped M off at preschool and been to the post office. An utterly glorious spring morning (but all that warm and wet last week has fair brought the weeds on). Home for coffee and another low as I dropped a large and very heavy pyrex jug onto my toe (probably a good thing she was at preschool and didn’t hear the language).

Picked her up: drove straight to Mothercare on the pretext that both girls needed shorts for the summer – actually I just wanted a bit of a drive so that M might have an afternoon nap and start to recover some equilibrium. Bought shorts then Maggie ran away from me in the carpark: she only wanted to help me strap Tamsin in but running away in carparks is one of my Things, so I got very cross. Was manhandling her into her carseat (Tamsin still sitting in the sling so effectively in one arm), bag, keys and M’s favourite cuddly, Weebee, on the floor behind me. A helpful woman picked up Weebee and passed it to me – I did say thank you but given stressy situation (kicking and screaming – Maggie not me I promise) was not terribly gracious and did rather grab it and mutter. I acknowledge that I could have been more polite but I don’t think I deserved a torrent of sweary abuse. Anyone with half a brain would have realised I was under pressure. Came home feeling really rubbish, but M has been great ever since (she did have a sleep in the end).

Last bad thing was soaking the bulghar wheat for tea in plenty of time, going to drain it to add to the salad and realising I’d selected the wrong jar and had still-hard barley instead. Bah.

Hey ho. Tomorrow’s another day.

It’s pink. It has tassles on the handlebars. It has a seat for a toy and beads on the wheels. It has a bag on the front. I think I kept my side of the bargain.

Not something I’ve posted about very much here – she deserves a bit of privacy just like anyone else – but we’ve been having some trouble getting M to poo in a potty. Not that she does it on the floor or anything horrid, it’s just that despite having been out of daytime nappies since last summer and dry at night for over a month now, she always demanded a nappy for a poo. We’ve tried everything: getting Weebee (favourite bunny toy) and Ginger (favourite cat toy) to do it, talking in glowing terms about her peers who can do it, promising chocolate and ice cream if she managed, getting cross, staying completely calm and laid back and not letting on it mattered (admittedly we were really bad at this strategy, and she’s not stupid), telling her the nappies will go away…but no good. She’s always (sorry, this post is definitely entering the realms of over-sharing) done it standing up so having to sit on loo or potty just seemed very difficult for her.

Two days ago, I promised I’d buy her a pink bike if she managed.

Last night, she did it.

I didn’t mean to disappear for so long, but rather overcompensated for Cameron being away this week and arranged so many activites, outings and visits – plus took on some work – that I barely found 2 minutes of my own. I estimate I lose an hour’s sleep every night when he’s away: evenings are spent doing jobs that he would usually do, or that we would do between us (ie I have to get M to bed and clear up after tea and get the laundry in and sort Tamsin out and close up the greenhouse and and and) so I go to bed later than normal, then, in the morning, who gets to deal with a bouncing 3-year-old demanding “breffast NOW”? Plus getting up in the night if required (drink/wee/new sheets/bad dream*), and waking albeit briefly and incompletely to feed and resettle the baby? Me. Yawn.

Anyway, he’s home: hooray. And I’m back both here and on Lisa’s dinners (and on all my normal message boards – and, probably, commenting on a blog near you soon).

Tamsin had her first swim this week and just loved it. You have never seen such a happy smily kicky splashy baby in all your life – looks like I have another water baby. I’ve managed to find her a class that coincides with Maggie being at preschool (although Tamsin has to sit on the side while Maggie has her swim – and this morning had to sit and watch Tumbletots. Which she did quite happily, mesmerised by all the large running climbing jumping bouncing balancing boys and girls).

*Last night I was woken at 4 by a scream of “I want to open my banana”. No, I have no idea. Preschoolers are nuts.

I suppose she used a lot of them up early, she was quite the action cat. A few must have gone when she fell off that 70-foot viaduct (hunting pigeons) onto the road below then spent the best part of a year in and out of surgery while they pinned and plated the smithereens of leg back together. And of course she moved first to Scotland where she terrorised the neighbours’ rabbits by sitting for hours on their hutch, then flew the 6000-odd miles to Tokyo, where she learnt to hunt lizards instead of birds and charmed all our neighbours. She loved small boxes and her party trick was to climb into a plastic bag for people to carry about. She slept in our bed under the duvet when it was cold and had one of the thickest, softest coats I have ever felt. She limped on her gammy leg  when the weather was damp and had her own red plastic stool in the kitchen to sit on. She was sad when we lost her sister. We loved her (and who would hit a cat in their car but not stop?).

RIP Jura; may your afterlife be full of small birds, small boxes and long grass.

Feeling a wee bit better this morning but back to no energy again this afternoon – have concluded I have some sort of post-viral crapness (even though quite a large part of me is going viral schmiral and suggesting I just need to pull myself together quick sharp. It’s terribly new agey, isn’t it, this (ma)lingering viral thing.) I am uninterested in food, however – most unusual – which suggests it’s not just knackered-mumness: Lisa’s Dinners has been on hiatus since I first sniffled. I’ve taken no photographs and am reading a really crap chick-lit novel and enjoying it (mostly). Something is amiss. Do I need a herbal remedy I can scoff at while admitting it might work?

Of course it might just be down to a perfectly understandable reluctance to edit 23 pages about quantum dots (they are very very small). Or fed-upness at the prospect of next week as single mum.

Absolutely and utterly fed up and grumpo today – and I can’t quite put my finger on the reason. The sky is grey, which isn’t helping but is something I generally take in my stride – one has to if one lives in Cheshire. Cameron is in Germany, but back tonight only an hour or so later than usual, so I don’t think it is that. Maggie is driving me nuts: for some reason she is awfully insecure and clingy today. Doesn’t want to go more than about a foot from me and prefers to hold onto my leg if at all possible (so I keep tripping over her). That isn’t helping either but I think it’s something more fundamental than all that: if I could just have half an hour off from being Mummy I could sit down and have a think and figure it out. (Huh. Who am I trying to kid? If I had half an hour off from baby-on-knee and preschooler-clinging I would have to tidy the house, do the ironing, cook tea and edit that unsolicited manuscript.) Oh, and Tamsin is the baby who will not nap.

A weekend of ups and downs to say the least. Friday was the traditional bank-holiday trip to Homebase for some wood (woo) – we now have a shelf up above the shiny new fridge. I got 2 rows of potatoes planted on Saturday: gorgeous out in the sunshine and a friendly robin kept perching stereotypically on my fork handle. Yesterday was really lovely: the sun shone, I turned my compost (a bit smelly as it’s rather too “green” not enough “brown”, and I honestly didn’t realise before I started that next door had guests – hope it wasn’t too stinky for them) while Cameron and Maggie made a lovely lemon yogurt cake, then we all spent the afternoon in the garden with the papers, tea and cake: M watered all the plants and next-door has got some very small and sweet puppies who peeped through the hedge at us.

Today has contained more downs. We had a very unusual lie-in, which the fortunes punished by means of a completely out of control screaming child. I am still at a loss to know what it was all about, but not a pleasant experience and frankly I’d rather have got up at 8 and had a little more emotional balance to my day. She’s been out of sorts all day (and regressing potty-wise too; I do hope she’s not getting ill again), to the extent that she lay down on the floor and refused to move in the middle of the garden centre, where she had been playing perfectly happily just the minute before. Oh, such joy. Cameron flies to Germany this evening and can’t get away soon enough.

I obviously told my Japanese agency that I would be returning to work after Easter as I logged on this morning to find a manuscript awaiting me – despite not having re-contacted them since T was born. I’m going to give it a try and see how I get on (they know how to flatter, telling me it was from one of my regular authors and suggesting I have been missed).