Astrid: She's more or less fine, we have a bunch of medical stuff to happen as follow-up but she's not worrying us any more. She knows some colours - red, blue, yellow, green, orange and pink, anyway. She's starting to use the potty.

Emer: She's still learning to read, interested in gardening and plants, healthy as a healthy kind of a horse, likes her hair in pigtails and has a very keen personal sense of style and is picky about clothes.

Linnea: She's fab, growing, full of beans, much easier to live with now that screen use has been more or less eliminated from normal everyday life, learning whatever she's learning in private.

Me: I'm ok, still tired, but fairly well, painting, planning to send work to Reading Arts Week exhibition in the Penta Hotel, and also to sell work at the Artists Place market that week.

Yesterday we nipped in to London for my first ever visit to the Science Museum. We'll be going back. It's brilliant. Today I'm mostly doing laundry and housework, because the weather is glorious and I've dried two duvets on the line already.

I've decided that I am just not going to accept "hitting children" or "physically assaulting children" as something grownups can't help doing. If I'm losing my temper that badly, I need help. I have a list of excuses, reasons or triggers as long as anyone's arm, but that doesn't make it ok, and I am allowed to insist that no-one persuade me that it's actually ok to hit children sometimes.

I really, really don't want them to grow up thinking it's ok to hit children "if you're cross enough" or something. I don't want them to fight the same urge to hurt I have to fight.

Also, I want everyone to breathe properly so I can get some sleep, please.

I am awful today. I hit Linnea.

Edit: Waiting for a call from a social worker. Friend here, Health Visitor called, etc.

Edit: The Health Visitor says we are safe parents, and is looking for help for us.

Astrid's urine sample was "doubtful" so we're having to redo it. I drop off the fresh one in the morning, and then we wait until Monday to get the results.

I went into town today and managed to go shopping, but it was hard; I kept walking into things, and couldn't understand people who spoke to me, or form whole sentences. I'm really quite tired now, and losing my grip or my perspective or both. I spent a chunk of this morning, before getting the call from the GP, talking myself out of the idea that the urine test would have shown that Astrid had cancer, or HIV, or something else serious. I knew it was bonkers but I kept thinking it.

While I was in town I considered getting on a bus going the wrong way, ie away from home.

My mother arrives on Friday morning. It will help not to be alone.

I'm still doing it. People don't buy stuff so much any more, possibly because I'm not on Facebook any more, but I'm having a really great time doing the art. Last night I did this as part of a Monday Paint thing (children in the afternoons, adults in the evening, one set of cleaning up).

At some stage in the middle of all this we had the kids' feet measured and bought them their summer canvas shoes. I had mine measured too.

I'm a 5.5H apparently. That might be why I can't wear women's shoes. But it gives me a place to start, anyway.

For all my social networking things, I want the following: an interface with a lot of boxes, so that I can drag'n'drop names from one to another. I want to have a big box containing "everyone else" and be able to create a lot of other boxes (friends, family, public figures, politicians, people I like, people who smell funny, etc) and drag names from "everyone else" into the specific boxes *so that there's absolutely no duplication at all unless I select some sort of "copy" option*. That's the bit I've never managed with any of the things I actually use. Ever.

... and she hasn't been well since. Last night the croupy cough was back, this morning her cough is wet and hollow, and her eyes are gluey. She's still having chest recessions every night. Our bed is propped up at an angle, because she has to be in the same bed as me so I can help her when she can't breathe, and she has to be propped up so that "when she can't breathe" isn't "always." We're using Shogun and Noble House.

Me? I've been ill on and off with it too. My hair is thinning, and possibly going grey though as ever that could be wishful thinking. I have earache as often as not. My mouth is full of blood blisters, I have a sore through, I'm exhausted.

We brought her to the out of hours service with a massive fever again during the week and were sent home to collect a urine sample, which I have dropped in at the GP for testing.

There must be something we can do. I'm miserable and exhausted. Rob's shattered. Linnea is very stressed. Astrid is sleeping 12-14 hours in 24, which is more than she used to, and her sleep is not restful for me. At all. Not even a little.

The good news is that the people who are getting enough rest, ie Linnea and Emer, are not ill at all.

(No, they can't operate to remove the tonsils while she's this ill, and if the problem doesn't exist when she's not ill, it's not worth the risk of the operation while she's so young. If she gets well and the problem still exists, then we start to think about cutting my baby open with knives and lasers, not before).

Astrid is still asleep. She's breathing laboriously but she's asleep. Poor tired baby. As soon as she wakes up I have to take her urine sample to the GP, but meanwhile, I've been tidying with the big girls.

We cleared everything out from under the sofa in their room, and everything from under the trundle bed, and put almost all the soft toys away, and made their beds, and found incredibly disgusting old laundry, and sorted the bench in front of the window where the house-toys go (Octopod, Pirate ship, Sylvanian house).

Next up is sorting the front room downstairs. Need to clear under cushions, clear floor, put away books and toys.

We need to sort more bookshelves for the children. It's getting to be a problem. I wonder where we can put more?