Rock Band

I got Rock Band a few weeks ago. MattA was on a work trip to the US and was willing to bring it back for me. This is despite the fact that it weighed 8 kg and the box was significantly larger than a suitcase - needless to say I am extremely grateful! Rock Band still does not have a confirmed release date for Australia, and with the PS3 version not out in Europe until September it could be another 6 months before it arrives down under. Even then it is likely to cost about $300. It is possible to buy it from eBay, but the price is (at least) a prohibitive $350. I ended up paying almost exactly half that.

I love playing will all three instruments - mic, guitar and drums - but drumming is definitely my favourite. Nailing a tricky drum beat with my friends singing and playing the guitar at the same time just feels amazing! I've made it through all the songs on Medium level, and I've just started moving on to Hard. Unsurprisingly it's starting to get a little tough!

My favourite songs to play are quite unexpected as I had never heard them before I got Rock Band - Foreplay/Long Time by Boston, and Detroit Rock City by KISS. I loved Foreplay/Long Time the first time I played it (with the guitar), and Detroit Rock City is extremely fun to drum along to!

I've been spending the money I saved on extra Rock Band songs and accessories. I've downloaded about 15 songs so far (including one of my favourite songs of all time - Interstate Love Song by Stone Temple Pilots), and I've ordered a bluetooth headset so Soph and I will be able to sing, play the drums and guitar at the same time with just the two of us. I've had a bit of trouble with the guitar, the strummer stops working periodically and I've had to open up the back and fiddle around with the mechanism to get it working again. This is a known problem, apparently a lot of people have had to return their guitars for replacements but unfortunately that's not an option for me in Australia. This week I finally got sick of it and ordered a replacement part that will replace the switching mechanism with a more reliable version.

Time to go practice that tricky section in Enter Sandman again...

Sleep

Liam has been sleeping wonderfully at night for over two weeks. We can now put him down at 7 (after his 6:30 feed) and he will generally go to sleep without any intervention from Soph or myself. He will usually cry a little at the start and sometimes a couple of hours in as well, but he's not really serious about it and goes back to sleep very quickly. We get him up for another feed at 10:30pm - ideally he is supposed to sleep through the whole thing but he usually wakes up when we burp him and change him. However he's still sleepy enough to go to sleep the moment we put him on his mattress. And for the last week or so we haven't heard a sound out of him until around 7am!

So I'm back to getting roughly the same amount of sleep as I was getting before Liam was born. Soph is still a bit sleep deprived as she used to go to bed a little earlier and wake up a little later, and Liam isn't letting her nap during the day as much as she'd like. In a week or two we're going to experiment with dropping the 10:30pm feed and seeing how Liam goes sleeping from 7pm to 7am. That way Soph will be able to go to bed as early as she likes, and start to catch up on hours and hours of lost sleep!