10 Jul 10

Well, it's been some months since my last blog entry and so much has happened since then. The most important being that we now have a son!!! Michael Andrew was born on Sunday 20th June at 5:44pm. We didn't start off that well and had to spent the first week of life in a Special Care Baby Unit. They pulled him through, but it was hard on all of us to see him there. I also lost of lot of my paternity leave going into hospital instead of spending the time at home with him doing father/son bonding. As the books say, bonding doesn't have to take place at an early age. After all, children are adopted at all ages and still bond with their adoptive parents.

However, the challenges of being a first time parent have become apparent. Despite being as organised as I can be, we often seem to be rushing around getting his bottles sterilised, making bottles, changing nappies, etc. Since he's been born, the weather has been quite hot, which makes sleep very difficult. And sadly, Michael hasn't got used to figuring out when night and day is. He spends most of the day asleep and is awake during the early hours most nights. Not good when you have to work during the day as I do.

With the continuing hot weather teamed with a lack of sleep, I'm finding that I'm getting very tired and snappy with people at present. I don't want to be, but these are particularly testing time and I hope those I bite the head off will bear with me until I get used to all this. I am told by other parents that it does get better over time. I know there are many people who will hate me for saying this, but I hope it gets cooler soon. 21 degrees and sunny is fine by me, but not this constant heat.

I having to write this blog on my works laptop, as my own laptop has suffered a failure of the operating system. I'm also very frustrated by my efforts to repair it, considering that fixing IT problems is my bread and butter. Fortunately, Chris has given me an XP Professional CD and I'm hoping at least to get back into the system to pull the data off before I can do a total rebuild. Since April, my laptop has suffered badly with viruses and spyware attacks. It used to be fine, until I made the stupid decision to install IE8. I had nothing but problems from that point onwards. So, once it's rebuilt, I'm going to stick with IE7 for a while longer (at least until a few more patches are released). I has AVG, Spybot and ZoneAlarm Firewall installed, but they haven't prevented these problems. One problem I had with the laptop was that I couldn't install Windows Updates on it. A rebuild should sort that problem out. But I do need to get the data off. I did a backup a few weeks ago, but I have Heather's account on it and they'll be out of date by now, so I need to files back. The rest of it isn't so bad. The other problem I have is that I'll have to re-install everything and now that most of the software is up in the loft now, I'll have a hard time getting everything back on. Another thing not improving my mood.