Article: Nina from Newlands from women24

Monday, 24th July
My lovely holiday seems a distant dream already. For some reason Georgie has transformed herself into a whiny toad midget who complains bitterly about not having ice-cream for breakfast, lunch and supper and wants to be picked up constantly.

Similarly, she seems surprised at the way I have replaced myself with a fat, shouty person who constantly sends her to her bedroom for time out. Wish dearly that someone would do the same for me.

Wednesday, 26th July
My vile mood remains unimproved following today's visit to the doctor. How can it be that I have managed to gain six kilograms in two weeks? Represents a truly superhuman effort on my part and may have something to do with the baklava eating competition waged between Scotty and myself whilst on holiday.

Refrained from telling the doctor about this though and instead ascribed my enormousness to an unfortunate gene pool: "Oh my mother and sister were exactly the same" I reassured him, "they were gargantuan when they gave birth and three months later were completely unrecognizably thin."

I think both of us remain unconvinced.

Even Scotty, who is normally utterly blind to people's sizes and shapes, has taken to visiting me while I’m having a bath in the evenings, to have a bit of a chuckle. He likes the squeaking noise I make as I wedge myself in and out of our (extremely narrow) bath. Tonight he took the opportunity to demonstrate the theory of water displacement to Georgie:

"Look Georgie, when Mummy is in the bath the water comes right up almost to the taps...and now she's getting out...wait, wait, be patient. Ok she's out! Now look at that – there's actually barely a puddle of water in the bath. Isn’t that amazing?"

Friday, 28th July
My week from hell finished off with the discovery of a large patch of mould on the wall of what was once my Home Office/Inner Sanctum/Refuge from Offspring and is now destined to be the Baby’s Room.

The mould revealed itself for the first time when I moved a large box of books that had stood waiting to be shelved for two and a half years. Feel very tempted to completely ignore this development and simply replace box of books with box of old toys which baby will be unable to play with for about another two and a half years.

Feel that the prospect of further forays into home improvement would be even more daunting than having a baby with serious mould spore related illness.

Tuesday, 1st of August
Our erstwhile handyman Quentin (aka Kingpin) has staged a comeback performance to tackle The Mould. Apparently this will involve bashing down most of the offending wall and then building it up again.

I have mentioned several times that the baby is due to arrive in about seven weeks. Hopefully this will inspire Kingpin to deliver more than four bashes to the wall per day.