And so ends another year.

2008 was one of the hardest, but also most rewarding, years of my life.

Some of my favourite moments:

• Helping catch Galen as he was born in the sitting room or our home
• Seeing mum and Nick again
• Every moment with Galen
• Scoring my first 100 in cricket
• Writing and releasing another software application for a business and seeing a significant positive impact to that business
• Our trip to Belfast to see a certain group perform

Some of my least favourite moments:

• Spending a Saturday night saving our property from a flood
• Losing a cricket match when the other team needed 32 runs from the last 8 balls
• The “summer”
• Some of those nappies

There were a lot more positives than negatives.

As expected, Galen has turned our lives upside down. In 2009 I hope that I can restore a little bit of balance to my life.

He’s a real, moving, noisy lump of adorableness.

My boy is growing like crazy. He’s now topped 16 pounds.

A few weeks ago he made his first almost-successful attempt at crawling. He lay on the bed, on his stomach, and pushed himself across the bed with his knees and his face.

He hasn’t done much movement like that since, but he’s now got enough strength in his arms to hold his head up. It’s only a matter of time before he’s racing all over the place.

He also likes using my Macbook Pro.

Well it’s been 8 weeks now since Galen made his first appearance.

I don’t sleep as much as I used to. I’m way better at changing nappies, and I have mastered doing up and undoing the little popper things on his clothes.

He was 9lb 15oz when he arrived, and he continues to put on a good amount of weight. On Friday he was weighed at 13lb 9oz. An impressive little lump.

Birth = 9lb 15oz / 4250g
9 days = 10lb
3 weeks = 10lb 11ozs / 4860g
3 1/2 weeks = 11lb 5 1/2 ozs / 5140g
5 weeks = 12lb 1oz / 5460g
6 weeks = 12lb 8ozs / 5660g
7 weeks = 12lb 13ozs / 5880g
8 weeks = 13lb 9ozs / 6140g

We get loads of smiles and laughs, and it’s only a matter of time now until he’ll be sitting up and moving around properly. I think I’ll have to wait a bit longer though until he’s driving a cricket ball through the covers.

Originally we’d planned not to use dummies, but blimey they were a good buy. Particularly early on when he was feeding every couple of hours and wouldn’t really settled down at all. The other thing that has been a massive help was this mobile, which he adores and really relaxes him, especially in the evenings.

In other news I crashed my car the other night doing about 20mph (there are some pictures over at Flickr. Our track was a bit slippery and I slid off it, across the field, and into a large boulder. The car had done 203,000 miles and we were planning to replace it this year anyway, so it wasn’t the end of the world.