I am deprived of sleep

I vaguely remember what it's like to have a full nights sleep, to wake up at 9ish with a full bladder to the aromas of a cooked breakfast frying away merrily downstairs*. If I was tired back then it was because I'd been up half the night drinking or had snuck into bed at 5am after staying up most of the night playing Championship Manager on the PC only to get up two hours later and pretend I'd actually turned in at the much more respectable 11ish.

Ever since M'laddo entered the world to Megadeth's Symphony of Destruction two and a half years ago I've not had an uninterupted nights sleep. That's not to say I'm up all night being manly and doing more than my fair share of feeding and so on because to be honest I'm not, I'm the main bread winner in the cool household and since I do a fairly technical job I do need to know what I'm doing and be at least vaguely aware of my surroundings most of the time, so for the vast majority of the time, wifey does all the nocturnal stuff with the wee lass and I occasionally stumble into M'laddo's room and climb into bed with him when he's distressed. Note: I've only started doing this since he got a bed, it would have been too impractical when he was still in his cot.

Just when he successfully started sleeping through the night, the wee lass came along and the whole thing started over. She's now a couple weeks shy of being 9 months old but she still thinks shes a newborn- waking up all night long, wanting a 5am bottle and generally being boystrous in a loud sort of way that M'laddo never managed. He was definitely a hard work baby but he wasn't quite as loud as she is.

I realised the sleep deprivation was beginning to take its toll the other night when I started having real trouble reading one of the Thomas the Tank Engine stories (Bulstrode, if you're really interested). I actually had to read each paragraph to myself before reading it out loud in case I made such as mess of it that sense went out of the window. I have a degree in English literature and a good one at that.

I'm constantly forgetting things, the number of times I get about 100 yards from the house on my way to work and realise I've left my lunch/keys/phone/trousers** at home are too numerous to count.

What's more amazing though is wifey. She has considerably less kip than me, often takes hours to drop off after getting up for a feed, and has to cope with two hyperactive children all day, cook the dinner and put up with my grumpiness when I get less than 8 hours kip. And she does all this with the most wonderfully even temprement, which is nothing short of utterly amazing. I feel embarressed complaining about my tiredness when she's much more knackered than me, but I suppose it doesn't make me less tired knowing there is someone asleep next to me more exhausted than I am.

Hats off to wifey then, me, I'm off to get a head start on tomorrow nights Thomas book :)

*my mum put a stop to this by telling wifey that all the cooked breakfasts were turning me into a fat knacker who was going to die of a terrible heart attack very soon. Boo hiss etc

**of the waterproof variety that is. No amount of lack of sleep would make me that daft.

Lego + Star Wars = Several shades of awesomeness

When I was a nipper we had older cousins who did the cool thing of passing down stuff that they had out grown to me and my little brother. They were around 10 years older than us so we got some really ace (if a little dated) stuff. This included about half a tonne of Lego. Over the following few years my Mum and Dad added as and when birthdays and Christmas's required.

Lego is every expensive if you want to build up a good selection of stuff to let youngsters let their imagination fully loose it can be very expensive if you don't have older cousins. My Lego is now living in my parents loft until M'laddo is the right age to get stuck into it but thanks to the incredible cleverness of Wifey, coupled with Oxfam, we have a new awesome supply of Lego. She managed to get several kilos of Lego, including the Star Wars figures (and probably a couple of ships once I sort it out properly) for the princely sum of £8.

I've been a fan of "proper" Star Wars since I was a nipper myself, so the chance to play with some actual Lego Star Wars, which only came around when I was a student, was frankly too much to pass up.

I really hope that M'laddo will have as much fun building things and being creative as I did when I was younger. If he gets halfway to where I did with my imagination, he'll have a wizard time.

Are you listening carefully?

I came into the room the other evening to find M'laddo holding court in the middle of the room. He'd arranged his selection of toys thus, in a large semi circle, and was sitting in the middle intently reading them a Bob the Builder story. He looked up to see what the interruption was, saw it was only me, and returned to story time.

I'm not a fan of the word but that was one of the cutest things in the history of things.

How much butter?

6 one kilogram tubs (with a good start made on the 7th). That's the answer now, what was the question again?

277 days ago I stood on the balance board on Wii Fit and weighed myself much to the derision of wifey, M'laddo and the cat sitting out in the garden smirking at me. I'd done everything I could, I weighed myself first thing in the morning before breakfast and was only wearing my Chicken Run pyjamas. And I still weighed 16.5 stone. Which, even at 6ft4inches was quite a considerable amount.

I then lost interest in Wii Fit as it was focused on balancing rather than actual exercise and I replaced it in my heart with EA Sports Active and a 4 mile round trip to and from work on foot.

I don't feel particularly thinner but then I have eaten a considerable amount of wifey's lovely homemade chilli and I suffer from what in anyone else would be an embarrassing case of trapped wind but in me is just plain old trapped wind.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is I have lost a stone in the last 277 days, which by my reckoning is pretty good. I'm now lighter than I've been since my university days. This is itself is odd because I've never seen myself as a fat bloke, even when I hit 17.5 stone by height and frame hid it reasonably well.

So I'm still overweight but if I can try really really really hard, I reckon I can make it to my ideal weight in 3 months- i.e. 3 days before Christmas when I completely ruin it all again :)

(I am slightly worried I'm now too bony and angular for lots of cuddles- will report back on how this pans out.)

The Hobbit

Wifeys post on all things nostalgic reminded me of my youth and the days I spent hunched over the keyboard of my Sinclair ZX Spectrum. My career as a programmer lasted but a brief time as I ended the two hours of typing in a programme from the back pages of Sinclair User magazine with the "run" command, only to see it crash and reset itself. Hmmm, I thought, I could have spent those two hours playing something fun, blow this for a game of soldiers.

And so a life long addiction began. 27 years on from playing Space Invaders on the Speccy, I still dabble when time permits with my Xbox360 or the Wii (when M'laddo lets me have a go anyway).

But thanks to the world of emulators, I can go back and play all the stuff I used to as a nipper if I'm so inclined. And after reading that post I am so inclined.

Which brings me to Spectaculator, a rather nifty programme that lets you play all those 8-bit Speccy games in their glory.

There are plenty of games I played to death when I was a nipper- Thru the Wall, Space Invaders, Eliminator, Xevious, TerraCresta and so on but the one that still haunts my dreams is the Hobbit.

It came with a copy of the book and was so blinking difficult I hardly ever played it. I was too young to know that I should have grasped a piece of graph paper and through trial and error mapped everything out. Instead I invariably gor eaten by trolls or fell off a mountain cliff pass. This tended to be after about 3 locations in the game but since it was a Spectrum game, had taken 10 minutes to load, and (if it didn't crash), a further minute or two to render each picture, it all took a while, giving the false sense of progress. And to rub it in, at random intervals Thorin the Dwarf would appear and sing about gold.

Well, let see if as an grown up I can progress a bit more :)

EA Sports Active

My feet aren't my best feature. I think I might have bunions developing and I suffer terribly from cracked toenails. My 2nd toe is about a centimetre longer than my big toe and makes it really difficult to get shoes fit properly.

Why the long hard look at my feet? Well I've seen rather more of them recently than I normally do. I've been keeping up the EA Sports Active reigme (but due to various trips I've still not managed to get going on the 30 day challenge), and doing it barefoot to boot (is that a pun? I'm too knackered to know). I'm liking the fact its full of different stuff to do, although if I have to do any more lunges, I might cry (in a manly way of course). Even my malformed feet are happy with the jogging and overall I'm still enjoying it and want to do more of it, I just need to find the time and motivation. For me though, coupled with my 3 and half mile walk to and from work, it's definitely beginning to show (I've dropped a couple of waist sizes this summer, which is nice- it's like I have an entire new wardrobe of trousers).

Anyway, in a couple of weeks I'll have enough spare time to blitz my 30 day challenge.

Go me!