Okay, I admit to be a little excited about my uilleann pipe order. This music renaissance in my life is making me feel like a kid in a candy store. The violin my friend loaned seems to have taken some of that edge off.
Phew. This music instrument acquisition syndrome is painful!
Oh, and I am buying a friend’s old banjo from him to help him de-stuff his house. Oh, my poor family.
Be careful not to leave that banjo in your unlocked car, my banjo-picking cousin Alan points out, because there’s a good chance you’ll come back to find someone has left another banjo there.
I hear with melodions it’s liable to be two or three.
Starting up on pipes, fiddle, banjo and whistle at the same time? Sounds like some serious sugar buzz to me. What’s your primary going to be?
Fiddle and Pipes are going to take the most effort to learn, so they will have to become primary.
The banjo is more of an oddity with no real goal, but a cheap oddity, at least.
The whistle has not proven too tough for me. I have reasonably good breath control now on my Gen High D and Bb’s, and can bounce up and octave and back without too much squawking, nothing that more experience cannot fix. What has proven tough is learning to read music. For the 5 songs that I have tab for, I learned them each in less than a day and can play them by memory now, except for Danny Boy. I am challenging myself to only learn from sheet music now, which has slowed down the pace.
Variety is the spice of life, and I having a blast right now! 
I assume you mean “Primary” as in “Care Physician”?
. . . except for Danny Boy.
OK, now I’ve got Danny Thomas stuck on my mind.
Thank goodness it isn’t Danny Kay… that could seriously interrupt a thoughtful day. 
Caedmon, expect to spend a lot of time learning both fiddle and pipes, they are among the toughest instruments to learn and play correctly. I advise you to go slowly and start off with one instrument, leaving the other for a later date. Both can be extremely frustrating to learn so great big gobs of patience are required.
It is the challenge of these new instruments that is driving me forward. I am loving it.
The pipes won’t arrive until October. I have until then to give the fiddle its due attention. I can rough out the basic C major scale in first position.