The floorers have once again let me down. On Friday they promised they'd be in to finish the job on Monday, and on Monday they promised today which means I was quite livid on going in this lunchtime, to see neither hide nor hair of them. This wasn't helped by the ensuing conversation with their boss in which he said he doesn't know why I was promised Monday or Tuesday, since they had another job which took priority, and then proceeded to blame me for the duration of the project. While I appreciate that a lot of the delay was caused by the other workmen who were in the flat at the same time, I also think that the floorers themselves are in part responsible, by turning up at 11:30 and leaving at 3 every day, and by failing to take advantage of any free time and space offered to them by the other workmen. So we shouted at each other for a couple of minutes and he has now promised to come in tomorrow to finish up. Which means I'm going to have to postpone my boiler replacement which was supposed to happen from tomorrow morning and will not endear me to the heating man from Pimlico, especially after having already told him I have to pay him with a cheque post-dated for next week.

The skirting boards do look great (despite my error in getting hardwood instead of soft), and the decorators are making excellent progress but I can't see past the hold-up with the floorers, and can't help wondering whether we'll be able to move in on Saturday at all. No news from the kitchen fitters yet either, as to whether the worktop will be ready. I don't mind if it isn't but it'd be nice to see the flat complete and I'd like to be able to supervise the installation. You have no idea how much I'm longing for a flat that's free of workmen and their associated crap. I don't even live in the place, but it stresses me out to have so much going on that runs the risk of ruining what's already in place. I went in at 7am to clean up this morning, and spent nearly an hour meticulously ridding the sitting room of rubble so that the decorators wouldn't go in and tread all over it. I could have done with 3 hours, not 1, but had to return at 8:15 so that Roj could get to work. Quite a large proportion of my responsibility on this project, I realise, is to get the place cleared up after each team has done their job. No-one gives a damn about the state they're leaving it for the next guys, except me. No thanks from anyone though, obviously; I wonder if they think I'm just interfering.

The current plan is probably to cancel our ski holiday next week. Roj is desperately seeking a way that we can still go (one scheme is to ask the grandparents to babysit for Miles while we take Jody, who will have miraculously made a full recovery). Personally I don't want to leave Miles for so long, especially in the event that he gets ill, and I don't think Mark Warner in Tignes will take kindly to Jody if her spots haven't pretty much disappeared. It's one thing to be told she's not contagious (and we'd have to have a doctors note to that effect); it's another to expect all the other parents to trust that decision or trust Mark Warner for condoning her attendance in the crèche. Personally I think we'd be better off cashing in on the travel insurance and using it for a week away when there's not such a high risk of everything going to pot. But Roj will keep working out the alternatives right up until midnight on Saturday, no doubt.

Mum arrives tomorrow afternoon which will enable me to get on with packing and to get out of the house unhindered. I've been leaving the kids in the car for altogether too long while I rant at the builders and today I called on Adam to babysit the kids in the car while I nipped to the bank (he didn't click initially that it was because Jody has chicken pox; he thought I was just too lazy to take them in there with me!)

The prospect of packing again, when the last move is so fresh in my mind, is not appealing. I'm completely unmotivated to deal with all the little bits that don't belong anywhere, and this is compounded by the knowledge that our abundant storage here will be approximately halved in the new flat unless we can gain access to the loft space without being fleeced. I'm not motivated for much at the moment actually. Jody and Miles are suffering a bit from being left to entertain themselves while I get things organised for the move, and I am pretty much at my limit of endurance for things going wrong in the new flat. What I need is a break; a week's snowboarding in the Alps would suffice. Sigh.

The chicken pox is finally here. Jody woke with some mosquito bite-esque red dots on her neck and torso yesterday, and there was no mistaking the reason. The timing is fairly horrible since I want to be able to come and go in the new flat as I please, but there's a slim chance it will have gone by the time we leave for France this weekend, so you won't hear me complaining. If that happens, then we still have to hope that Miles doesn't come down with it while we're away. It's normal for the second sibling to get it worse than the first (though that didn't happen in my case), so it would be pretty visible early on, and I believe they don't take kindly to that sort of thing on the plane.

Calamine lotion and bicarbonate of soda baths abound. Jody isn't in the least bit affected by it; she seems to have just as much energy as before, if not more. It's Miles whose sleep patterns are currently disrupted. I spend half the night shooshing him from our bed, and then going in to stroke his back when he won't settle. And by 5:30am when he wakes up, I tiptoe into their bedroom (they're together at the moment) to fetch him before he wakes Jody, and then put up with his little clammy feet pummelling me for the next hour and a half.

The pile of boxes in the sitting room increased this weekend. Roj was on a bit of a mission to get his stuff sorted, since he won't have much opportunity at the end of the week. I spent more time trying to transfer files to our new computer so we won't have to set up the old one when we move. I can't wait to get rid of the brick-like Dell that I brought back from the US, with its hefty transformer and million peripherals, but it's always a scary prospect to hope that all your settings have transferred properly and that you won't have lost something horribly important in the process. It didn't help that the new beast suffered a Blue Screen Of Death yesterday after I installed my Polar software. It's altogether too young for that sort of thing and I was not impressed.

Jody's discovered the computer of late. To date it's been what mummy's disappears to when she does some "work", but now she's been introduced to the CBeebies website, there's no stopping her. I can see ownership battles in our future.

Zoltan started installing skirting boards this morning, in the sitting room. He's such a nice guy it inspires me with confidence. Of course I could be sorely mistaken, as I was with an unidentifed one of my 8 previous tradespeople who made off with my radio, crowbar and plastering trowel, but that's the price you have to pay when you like to trust people. Just add it to the mammoth cost of the project; they obviously did.

Have to go and juggle money. Oh no ... we don't have any left. Have to go and juggle overdrafts then.

Goodness. I seem to be swinging from low to high and back to low again on this project, often for the most irrelevant of reasons. This morning I was on a low after seeing impossible-to-shift screedy footprints on the dark blue carpet of the shared hallway. Then I saw that the floorers had omitted to lay the soundproofing adequately along one wall in the sitting room. So I shouted at the decorator who was as stubborn as me about where he wanted to be working, which annoyed me even more. And then the skirting board delivery guy didn't warn me of his imminent arrival so I had to wake Miles yet again (from a much needed nap that follows a day of puking yesterday) and scramble over there. And now there's a huge pile of 3.7m long skirting in the hallway that needs to be shifted piece by piece up the stairway: A job for tomorrow, as long as I don't get lynched by the other residents for blocking the hall. Or messying the carpet. I wonder how unpopular we'll already be on 3rd March when we move in.

But I have found a company who is accommodating in terms of delivering and installing my mammoth fridge freezer which will, no doubt, have to be inched up the stairs. They will talk to me on the phone first, and take measurements, to determine whether access is possible, though the rep. did warn me that they might not be prepared to lump it up the stairs. I have to hope that the lift miraculously breathes out to accommodate it and that the lady in Flat 1 keeps her head down while they try and force it in there.

At least the decorators are working hard now, getting the place prepped for a full whitewash next week. The floorers were supposed to have finished but haven't (surprise surprise), and the electrician was back this afternoon to install the extractor fan in the bathrooms. The kitchen is done except for the work-surface which was templated yesterday and will be installed at the tail end of next week if we're lucky, and it's immaculate. I'm still in two minds as to whether it looks too flashy, too stark, too modern, over-designed or just really nice and crisp and clean. It will soften when the accoutrements of living are added; right now it certainly looks like a showroom kitchen, especially with the Elica Om gracing the far wall.

I still get no firm feeling that everything will be done by our end date. There's so much still to achieve and the flat is knee-deep in dirt and rubble bags and sawdust. I'm exhausted by the relentlessness of the project, much as it's really been quite a short one, and the inexorable overspending. And I find it very difficult to accept standards lower than my own, even though that's what I'm seeing in a couple of places.

But the move-in date is now set in stone; the movers are booked and the generous babysitters (my parents) will arrive on Thursday evening to allow us a full day of packing on Friday. The sitting room is already full of boxes and shelves are starting to empty which, as Roj says, is the final sign that this move is really going to happen. We have to believe it now.

The Tignes week hardly seems real in the light of all the upheaval that will happen next weekend, yet we'll be there (barring red spots) sometime on Sunday, and Roj is already obsessively checking snow reports. Thanks to eBay and some discount online shopping, I finally bought ski gear for both the kids at a cost of just £45, rather than the £200 I was contemplating (aghast) in Snow and Rock on Wednesday. I still think the holiday timing is awful - I would rather be sewing curtains and unpacking boxes - but maybe when I get there I'll actually find a way to relax and enjoy it. Certainly there are times that I've wanted to run as far away from Montagu Square as humanly possible, so I should perhaps capitalise.

The weekend was consumed by yet more vacuum cleaning, this time with an industrial model hired from Travis Perkins. 5 hours it took me, on Sunday, to get the flat into some semblance of order so that the floorers could make progress today. Shame workmen don't know how to clean up after themselves.

Tomorrow morning Stuart's going to switch on the power, which will be a momentous thing. We've had nothing for a week now, and prior to that only a total of about 10 lights in the whole flat (bathrooms, kitchen, hallway and a couple of pointless wall lights in the sitting room). It's going to be amazing to see the 45-odd halogen downlighters put into action.

The plastering went well on Saturday, although Mike the plasterer is one of the prime sources of my mess anguish, since he can't seem to avoid leaving little heaps of dripping plaster under the holes he's patching. His plastering is very good though, and I didn't have much alternative, so I'm happy enough to clean up after him though it pains me to have to do so on the newly-laid wood floor in the master bedroom.

The kitchen got delivered today. There was some angst between the guys unloading and the woman in Flat 1, but that's to be expected when they were trying to squeeze every inch of capacity out of the lift that she tenderly guards with her life. Goodness knows the reaction in the building when they bring the tall cabinets tomorrow, and take them up the stairs. Should give us an inkling into what the move proper will be like, in 10 days' time.

It's a good job I mentioned the kitchen delivery to the other workmen, because the floorers suddenly realised another layer of screed was required in that corner, and only just managed to pour it on before the kitchen delivery arrived. Then I had to call off the kitchen fitters so that the floorers could screed the entrance hall again this afternoon. Fortunately the kitchen fitters had no intention of turning up until tomorrow, but it could have gone either way. Such is the life of a novice property developer stroke juggler.

My skirting was cut today and should turn up on Friday in anticipation of Zoltan starting work on Monday. I'm looking forward to that stage in development, because the last vestige of underlying building structure will finally disappear and the place will look liveable at last. Sean the decorator will be in all week too, breathing life into the dull ancient magnolia walls with his paintbrush.

We've even started buying furnishings. The extendable table has been loitering in the bathroom for a couple of weeks now, and yesterday we added to our collection with curtain poles and a bunk bed for Jody's room. Finally we acquire the safety of a single-floor flat and compromise it by purchasing a bed accessible only by ladder. But it is nice, and will make sleep-overs more feasible.

Tomorrow my parents arrive and I will attempt to keep them out of the flat after the reaction last time they saw it. I don't know whether they believe I can pull it off ... I don't know whether I believe that yet, but there's no point in showing them the war wounds before they're sewn up. Plus there are only so many people that flat can take.

More flat-renovation obsession. There are other things going on, but not really things I can mention here. Suffice it to say that I will be thinking very strong positive thoughts at 2:30 tomorrow afternoon.

Did I say we were making progress? I lied. How can cutting 4 or 5 chases in half a house create an inch of fine powder over absolutely everything? I spent 2 hours last night and this morning breaking my Dyson by fastidiously getting at all the heaps of fine rubble that had found themselves under the edges of the underlay. It's just a reminder that I'm doing all this in the wrong order and the wrong timescale. My electrician even had the gall yesterday, to send my floorers home, given that he didn't deem it possible to work together in such a small space. Delusions of project management methinks.

I got a babysitter all to myself yesterday, so that I could go out to a cocktail bar and dance into the early hours. Only I ended up fitting coving and scrabbling around on the floor by the light of a lone bulb and a headtorch while Roj was in the office till after 2am; oh the glamour. The coving could have been better but most of it will be invisible behind kitchen units to all but the very tall, so it'll do. I'll have to pull all the stops out for the mammoth piece that fell off in the sitting room the other day, but for that I will definitely need some help.

Tomorrow morning the plasterer comes in to make good all the holes that abound throughout the flat. And after that there should be less mess by a long way. Right now I can hardly stand to be in the place, since the workmen have obstinately taken ownership. The messier it gets, the more depressing it is, so I've got to the point where I just want to go away and come back when it's done. Except that's an oxymoron so I'll have to grit my teeth and get on with it.

Next week (half term) my parents will be here for a couple of days for the Fabric Show, which will very usefully allow me a small amount of time to move about unconstrained. I hate taking the kids up to the flat even more than I hate going myself; Jody wants to flirt with all the workmen and Miles wants to play with the powertools. On Wednesday he got in the lift by himself and pressed all the buttons (including the alarm) on the way down and the way up. Still, the grin on his face when he popped back up to the fourth floor was almost worth 4 minutes of thinking through all the emergency scenarios arising from a 1 ½-year-old stuck in an elevator.

Yesterday the owner of the ground floor flat had a fit in front of my eyes, because the chasing was causing enough vibrations through the chimney for grit to be falling on her dried flower arrangement downstairs. I was necessarily very apologetic and humble and will later drop the £20 through her door that it cost the florist to do a cleaning up job on the flowers, but I hope she caught the facetious edge to the offer of my own services as a maid, while my kids sat in the car. To be fair, she'd been up till 4am the night before making food for the dinner party she was having that evening for the ex-finance minister of whichever country she's from (she didn't mention that bit). I understand that a fine dusting of soot would, in the light of that level of hosting pressure, appear rather mountainous.

Meanwhile I've also checked the crack which has materialised in flat 3 during the course of our work. It's just a small case for a decorator with some caulk, but there'll be some complex colour-matching to be done. Another good reason to plump for white, but I'm not offering to re-decorate their white-with-a-hint-of-limoncello. Which reminds me, our kitchen area actually looks quite nice now that it's all been painted up. I can't wait to see how it looks next week when the kitchen furniture is installed, though I'm currently undergoing bouts of inevitable paranoia that the other workmen in the flat will cause the whole schedule - if not the kitchen itself - to collapse.

I must remember to buy a new cable lock for the gate to next door's cellar. In the electrician's eagerness to get to the metres, I didn't double check the correct entrance and allowed him to cut through the lock which appeared to have been placed there erroneously. It didn't take long to find out that we should have gone down the next stairway along (which didn't have a lock of any kind), rather than spending 30 seconds with a hacksaw. Bother.

I'm still on the lookout for spots on the kids. The only thing to materialise is another grotty cold and raspy nighttime cough, but there's still plenty of time for either of them to catch chicken pox in time for it to be at full flow when we're supposed to be heading for Tignes. Gah.

We're finally making progress (slowly) in the flat. It's been looking much worse the last few days as our messy sticky soundproofing underlay has been put down, and the chasing has been done for the wiring to go from the ceiling to the plug sockets. But today the floorers started putting proper underlay down, having yesterday done the penultimate (we think) screed layer; the plasterer came in and neatly fixed up the new holes that have had to be made in the kitchen (though he left quite a lot of mess when he did it), and people have in general, been making good progress.

Apart from Stuart the electrician who's been ill these past couple of days and though he whinges plentifully about other people slacking, doesn't believe the rules apply to him. To be fair though, he does sound like he's got a nasty cold and he did work his butt off over the weekend to try and get the kitchen done for me. And he's helping me out with disposal, so I can't complain.

I've hired a dehumidifier for a week to dry out the plaster work in the kitchen so that the decorator can come in at the end of this week. I'm still trying to fix the right dates for Zoltan to come in to do skirting (and decide on the style of skirting we'll buy), but the beginning of the wood floor was delivered today and other things are gradually falling into place. It's far from being exciting, but it's a shade off depressing, which is an improvement of sorts.

One minor disappointment is that the gas man who came in to do a survey today to check that our system will take the combination boiler recommended by their salesperson a week ago, has told us that we don't have the water pressure to do so, so we're forced to retain the loft tank, cistern and boiler (upgrading the latter). On the bright side this saves us a bit of money, but it's money I'd gladly pay out if we were able to garner a bit more storage space in that cistern cupboard.

And today I discovered the unsavoury explanation for the missing towel that I'd kindly supplied the builders. I don't mind a towel going missing - it'd probably have had to be thrown away anyway - but for it to be used as toilet paper and then shoved in the back of a cupboard is pretty disgusting. Granted I should have noticed that the loo paper was running low and replaced it, but did the offender really think that I wouldn't notice the thing if he threw it behind a closed door? Could he not have disposed of it in the bottom of a rubble bag? Surely 100% of people in this world would rather ponder briefly over a disappearing towel than discover this sort of evidence? Eurgh.

I still think the kids are in for chicken pox. At yoga yesterday, one mum turned up with her two daughters, one of whom wasn't doing yoga because she was in the throes of full-on pox. I thought it was an odd decision to bring the poorly one when there could have been pregnant people around, but her mum was very careful to keep hold of her by the hand and not let her near the rest of the kids (not that it would have made any difference, since it's very contagious and airborne). But Jody, ever the gregarious one, unsuspectingly went over to put an arm around her and ask if she was alright, too fast for anyone to do anything. I was a bit annoyed, but I think she's already got it anyway, since she's complained of some of the pre-rash symptoms today (sore throat and headache), and she's left some of her lunch the last two days which isn't like her at all. I only hope she'll get it and recover in time for us to go snowboarding on 4th March. And that Miles miraculously avoids it or gets it at the same time. And pigs might fly.

Which reminds me, we've put our moving date back a week to the very last feasible day which also happens to be the day before we go on holiday. This is not music to my ears, knowing how exhausting it is to move house and how depressing it will be to return to a place full of boxes, but I have no choice; we need to allow the tradespeople access to the flat for the full week preceeding the move because there's no way the work will otherwise get done. We'll be getting help from some men-with-a-van and my parents to look after the kids, so I just hope it will go better than I suspect. And that the lift works for the whole day. At least it's not midsummer, like last time. There has to be a bright side somewhere.

I suppose my whole life is consumed with flat renovation stuff right now, so there's not much else to report. Except that I'm off to the cinema tonight with Suze to enjoy Dreamgirls which should be fun. I'm desperately hoping that everything else will go to plan with the flat, since there seems to have been so much go wrong. Everybody has been inconvenienced to some extent: I just hope that it will all be worth it.

Disaster averted. At a cost. After a sleepless night worrying about lifting up the screed and plywood and floorboards and postponing all my carefully planned tradespeople, I spoke to Stuart the electrician early on Friday morning and he confirmed Roj's best suspicions - that it is possible to re-wire the circuits in the roofspace rather than under the floorboards. It's a more expensive solution because it's more awkward and involves chasing down the walls to the plug sockets in every room. But considering our alternatives ... well, we don't have any. All our credit cards are now maxed out. Can this job get any bigger?

So the current reasons for my insommnia? Mostly it's the soundproofing underlay which is proving very awkward to fit properly and the backing paper (we shouldn't have had the stuff with the backing paper, but they were out of stock of the normal stuff and said it wouldn't make any difference) is the main cause for concern. It's definitely preventing clean sealable joins, without which it's going to be less effective. I'm sorely tempted to get Custom Audio to replace the remaining rolls with normal stuff early next week if it's possible.

And also I can't find my Polar s710 and, like Roj says, I border on the obsessive so to go running without it, or simply to relax after a good hour of vain searching, is difficult. So it's 1am and I'm unlikely to see the inside of my eyelids until morning, the way these things usually go. How long can it take to turn a 3-bedroomed mews house upside down in the quest for a pulse meter watch? Well, I'm not running till 7, so there's plenty of time.

I'm thinking of postponing our move-in date by 4 days. I'd like it to be a full week, but we should be somewhere on the Alps by then. 4 days should give the painter/decorator time to complete his job so we're not moving in in the middle of it. And gives some of the other workmen time to run over should they need to, which looks increasingly likely the more people we keep trying to cram into the same small space. The floorers will unexpectedly have to come in on the Monday after we were going to move, for certain, since we've been advised against fitting the kitchen units on top of the wood floor. On the bright side this means that we don't risk damage to the kitchen floor when the kitchen insallers are in, but I would just hate to spend our first few days in that flat tip-toeing around a bunch of workmen and not being able to unpack properly. So Thursday it is I think, pending a childcare solution on that day.

Our flat needs re-wiring. This is about the worst news we could possibly get. I suppose it's partly naivety that we hadn't noticed or didn't think to check. As it happens, some of it appears to be old black rubber-insulated wire, which is something that got phased out in the 1960's. Rubber, as anyone with a bike or a wetsuit will know, deteriorates, and the risk of rubber cable housings disintegrating is apparently very high, leading to the risk of circuit failure, fire, death, destruction ... And I'm not joking. All the online searches I've come across have cited black rubber cable housing as the first reason to re-wire your house. Then they cite plug sockets in the skirting boards; we have those too.

Shame the floors in two of our rooms were screeded today.

Roj is hoping that the rewire can go into the ceiling or the wall cavities. I'm just hoping I don't get yelled at too much by the guys we'll need to postpone. If we're quick, I reckon that we can get the re-wire done before the kitchen installation is booked, so it's only the floorers that will have to come in at a later date. I don't know who'll dig up the screed layer though, and take up the ply. Course we won't be able to move house when we thought we'd be able to either. And then there's the question of the week in the Alps in early March. Who's going to project manage while we're away?

I'm not as depressed as I could be about it though; it's fair enough; it's inevitable; I've had a few hours to think about it and more than anything else, I've felt that things were too good to be true for a while now. The electrician said that we could if we wanted to, leave it as it is, although he would have to put a disclaimer on his invoice. But now we know about it, there's no way in a million years that I will be happy to bury my head in the sand over something that is potentially so hazardous. Not with our precious little babies living there with us anyway, and not when our current idea is to keep this flat for many years to come. It would be like someone telling me that the brakes on my car needed urgently replacing, and me deciding to pack my lovely family into said car and drive through the Lake District for a couple of weeks. Besides which, the floor will be hideous to get up right now, but it will only get worse. If we postpone, then we'll be faced with doing the whole thing in 5 years or so, when the circuits actually start to break, and then we'll have to remove (and replace) skirting boards, remove 115 square metres of wooden floor, and remove 6 rooms' worth of screed, ply and floorboards. Worse. Much worse.

So re-wire it is then.

Shit.

Can't decide whether we've doubled or tripled our original budget for sorting out this flat. It would help if we'd had a proper budget in the first place, or a proper specification for that matter. We didn't know we needed to replace the radiators until Tuesday and we didn't really think about installing lights until mid-week either. The water/heating system we've suspected for a while (and have been horribly let down by our area salesperson), but we didn't really think about the need to remove the water cistern, water tank and most of the piping as well as replace the boiler. None of this work comes cheap, and I suddenly find myself talking in k as if they were hundreds, and hundreds as if they were tens. We still think the mammoth amount of money we're spending will add to the value of the flat and we may invite a weasel agent around when we've finished to confirm that. Whatever happens, it'll be a great place to live and we're very much looking forward to moving in. If the paint's dried, that is.

Actually the panic's over in terms of completing the tasks in time. I've got a nice series of different workmen lined up like a jigsaw puzzle. I just hope they can all be accommodating. If we take on this sort of thing again it's clear that we'd be better off talking to a contractor rather than individual teams. For which we'd need a proper budget and a proper specification. Ah.

I'm going to try my hand at coving today, and I've already received instructions from Mike, the kitchen plasterer, who kindly put up with Jody's chatter in the latter half of this week, on plastering up the holes left by the lights we're taking out of the kitchen. He even went back down to his van to fetch me some offcuts of plasterboard, bonding and plaster that I can use. And this after repairing a hole in the kitchen wall that he wasn't responsible for doing. Fab.

I still have to choose between the Hungarians, Poles, Scots and Russians for installing the skirting boards. No-one thinks it's an unusual or difficult job though, so it's just a case of choosing between quotes. Right now I'm leaning towards Zoltan the Hungarian Carpenter. Who could refuse a name like that?

Finally Jody didn't throw up in the pool on Saturday. On Friday, for the second time in a row, she did, and the instructors emphatically (but very patiently) explained that they didn't think she could handle a full hour in the pool. After speaking to Jody about it, my personal opinion is that it was more about how much water she was swallowing since nobody had told her to keep her mouth shut when she went underwater. I was so nervous on Saturday that she'd do it again and I'd have to stop the lessons altogether that I felt sick myself, but I asked the teacher to keep checking she was ok and to minimise her underwater time. In the end she had a lovely time and came out proudly exclaiming how she wasn't drinking the water now. I've changed her Friday lessons to Saturdays just in case, even though she'll miss her little love affair with Claudia Winkleman's son.

She also spent 3 hours on a playdate with a nursery friend yesterday which was great for us. I'm so glad she's happy to be dropped off and abandoned. I'm not confident that Miles will be so independent but Jody doesn't even bat an eyelid. And while Simone thinks it's easier to have playmates (for any or all of her 3 sons) than not, I'm more than happy to lend her my daughter!

Miles has finally started saying Dada and Mama with regularity. He says it in such a funny way, with a real sing-song lilt at the end, that it makes us giggle. He says a handful of words now, chief of which is 'Helloooh,' which he's been saying for well over 6 months. His understanding is excellent though, and I hold full conversations with him at times, watching as he responds as if he's 2 years older. He's still the most pleasant and easiest baby to deal with, apart from the fact that one has to have done several years of weight-lifting before one can successfully manoeuvre him to hip height.

Sadly we had to abandon the offroad duathlon today. I'd have loved to do it, but my streaming cold and DIY obligations have kept us here in London over the weekend. We took a trip to Thurrock yesterday to visit Ilva on a new bed hunt, but were sorely disappointed that our chosen item was about 20cm longer than it appears on their website. And when we only have about 60cm clearance between the bottom of a standard bed and the wall anyway, that's something we just can't accommodate. Back to the expensive solid (but sustainable) wood bed companies then. Sigh.

We also finally saw the dining table we've ordered from Habitat in real life and were rather appalled at the pinkish shade of the dark woodstain they've used. It was supposed to tie in with the dark stained doors I've got on the base units in the kitchen but it's clear there'll be a bit of a mismatch. Given that we'd have to spend £80 to send the thing back at this stage, we're just going to have to accept it unfortunately. It's the right dimensions, it's just not the right colour. Just another small glitch to add to the cheap radiators and the lack of time to remove the grotty lining paper and the solid drainage pipe that can't be removed in the kitchen and the fuseboard that's hidden in a kitchen cabinet and the chronically squeaky floorboards and everything else that is less than perfect in our flat. Wesley the plumber calls it 'character', But I'll reserve cynical judgment until the work is done.