Training day at school today which is always good for a skive so i've made an early dash for the exit, Cath has nipped off to Tesco, Olivia is happily snoozing, meaning i have freed up five minutes to update you on how we're finding this parenting lark. As Ronan Keating so sagely observed, life is a veritable rollercoaster - though the word veritable was chopped from the final chorus as it didn't scan - and no where is this more evident than in bringing up baby. This week alone has seen us visit horrible lows - a sustained, marathon crying fit seemingly the result of constipation - and yes we considered bringing my Mum in to hold her hand to see if that could set her going - and huge highs - the sheer relief as dark matter finally oozed into her nappy, and a few resonant, Barney Gumble style belches.

In terms of the impact on our lives the biggest adjustment we've had to make is that virtually eveything is done in bite-size chunks; eating, sleeping, watching TV programmes, reading the paper, everything is broken down into morsels rather than being done in one fell swoop. This very paragraph is a case in point. You wouldn't know it, but i actually started writing it a couple of hours ago, but in the interim i've changed Olivia's nappy, thrown her about a bit, and sat her on my lap as we watched the first half hour of Napoleon Dynamite - "Bow to your sensei; BOW TO YOUR SENSEI!" I usually finish one week's Oberver just as the next one arrrives, and the Guardian's are piling up like some kind of Berliner format snowdrift. What's that? Cancel it? Don't be daft, that'd be like vowing to go without oxygen.

As for the NME, well it's the Cool List issue next week and i can't miss that - for one thing i need to find out if i'm in it or not, and then it's a run of free CD's, then it'll virtually be the Christmas special, and no one can live without that.

So not everything has changed; it is possible to be a parent and still be 14 at heart.