I’ve just been through one of the toughest days of my life, and thankfully it ended on a high. My wife gave birth to my second son this afternoon, after a marathon slog of stalled labour, epidural gone wrong, and an induction that could have caused major complications resulting in a c-section to get my boy out.

Thankfully the induction went ok, and eventually with a lot of hard work, my wife was able to deliver him.

With the new addition to the family things might be a little quieter than usual for a few weeks. I do have a few DIY posts, and reviews to write up at the moment, so hopefully they will trickle through over the next three or four weeks.

Well my little fella turned one today. Time really has flown by. It’s been the hardest time of my life, but also the most rewarding.

Watching him grow up oh so quickly has been an amazing experience, and I hope he has had as much fun as I have. The good times definitely make up for the tough times.

Anyway, the little man was at daycare today, and when we picked him up we were told that he had just fallen of a bench seat. I thought he was a little too small to be sitting unassisted on the seat, and clearly he was.

He was very tired, so when we got home we put him down to sleep before dinner. He woke up and hung with me for a little while before I gave him dinner. He slipped over once, and I attributed that to the slippery floor boards, but whilst I was out Mama was looking after him and he kept falling over and crying holding his hand.

Mama called me and asked me to get right home as she was worried about his arm. We went to the doctors and waited around for an hour and a half (it was after hours).

The doctor suspects he has a fractured forearm, and so tomorrow morning we have to rush to get some x-rays, and potentially a cast if it is found that he has the fracture. And then we’ve got to hopefully get him to his 1st birthday party on time!

We’ve just spent the night getting everything ready for the party,  so we should be right to go. I just hope his arm is ok, and just strained. 3 weeks in a cast will really slow down his development. He has just started trying to stand on his own with no support. I hope he will be ok…

It’s funny, what prompts you to think of things. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in the hospital this morning with my son who has not been well. He has been throwing up pretty badly overnight so we rushed in to the emergency ward at 3.30am. 

We are driving along with the radio on quietly, and there is the little fella in his car seat, looking pale as a white sheet bopping along to the music! It doesn’t matter how unwell he is feeling, he can still dance to music.

My little man has loved music from a very early age. So early in fact, that the first time we noticed him reacting to music was when my wife was 4 months pregnant with him. We had some Paul Gilbert on, and he just started jumping/rolling around in the womb to the music. Once the music was turned off he stopped.

We even went and saw Paul Gilbert live when the wife was 7 months pregnant, and the little fella jumped around in her the whole time! I met Paul after the show and told him that we had brought his youngest fan, he thought that was very cool.
I could even play guitar and he would start moving around. I remember one time when the wife was having a bath during her last trimester and I had gone in to my music room to jam a bit. I started playing and next thing the wife is calling to me. She says to keep on playing and come have a look (my music room is across from the bathroom).

So I move myself so I can see in the doorway, and there is her belly jumping around. When I stop it stops, when I start playing again, it starts moving again.     

Since he was born I have played guitar to him, and we have a selection of Rockabye Baby albums. They are great albums for the bubs, covers of your favourite bands made to sound like lullabies - very cool.

Now that he is a bit mobile he loves to come in to my music room when I am playing. He’ll sometimes have his toy guitar so he can play. Other times he will want to play mine. He climbs up and holds on to the neck of the guitar, or taps on the body’s of the other guitars on the rack. He loves it when I lay the guitar on ground so he can hit the strings and play with the volume and tone knobs. He’s trying to work out how a whammy bar works too. 

The little fella loves all sorts of music, and he even has a couple of different dances. He’ll wave his hands in the air, clap and drum on his knees or table, etc.

As a musician I am very excited to see my little man have such a love for music at such a young age. I hope it keeps developing over the years so we can enjoy music together, both listening, and playing.

I will be buying him a ukulele for his birthday next month, and I think I will buy him some bongos too seeing as he also loves drumming on things.  Get him started early on his musical journey.

My son is close to 11 months old now. The wife and I have had a tough time getting him to sleep well, and only in the last two weeks have we had success getting him to sleep all night.

Now we are finally all getting a good nights sleep. What is amazing though is that while I am getting a full night’s sleep, I feel worse now than I did when I was running on less shut-eye. And to top it all off I seem to have developed a head cold.

It’s funny how your body can just get use to running on less sleep than is really healthy for you, and then when you start getting enough again your body and mind cannot seem to handle it?

I started thinking about this today. Is there like a scale, for example for every hour of sleep below 8 hours you miss add another day of good sleep to make up for it?

So say for example average hours below 8 hours each night = 2 hours. Now times that by 7 for the week:

• 7 x 2 = 14 hours

Now times that by 4 weeks to get an average for the month:

• 14 x 4 = 56 hours

Then times that by 10 months:

• 56 x 10 = 560 hours

So 560 hours to make up for the lack of sleep over the 10 month period. I’ll work that out in to days of proper sleep by dividing it by 8:

• 560 / 8 = 70 days

I certainly hope that it isn’t going to take just over 2 months to get over the 10 months worth of rough nights!

My maths may be dodgy too, plus this scale has no scientific basis. Please don’t take it as a real scientific scale.  This is just the ramblings of a tired man.