I think I've just about got over the feeling that my daughter's head is going to fall off.

Babies are, well, fragile, especially if you're a man and not used to handling them. Newborn babies don't have very strong neck muscles and you have to be careful and for the first couple of weeks I kept feeling that if I made the slightest wrong movement, her head would fall off.

Thankfully, it hasn't. She still has a habit of turning her head this way when I'm trying to move her that way, but fortunately we seem to be still more or less in agreement and more or less intact.

I still worry, just as I worried while her mother was pregnant that something would happen to them both - a fall, a car crash. Now I worry when she cries and I worry when she goes quiet.

Last week she turned five weeks old and we went into the hospital to have her hearing checked. Caitriona lay in her pram, sound asleep, while a nurse fitted sensor pads to the back of her neck and put headphones over her ears. It looked as if she was listening to a Walkman.

All she was hearing was a series of clicks, while the sensors tracked the responses, deep within her brain.

Her audio responses, apparently, are fine.

That's one less thing to worry about. But I can think of lots more. Why does she hiccup so much? Why are her legs so bandy? Will she ever be able to walk? Why does she keep looking over my shoulder when I hold her up? Will she ever be able to see?

Now, I'm pretty sure most of these worries are unnecessary. I mean, she’s not yet six weeks old and I’m probably expecting too much. My claim that she has already spoken her first word met with derision in this household.

But she did, she said her brother’s name. “Philipp”.

Well, actually, what she said, when I was lifting her up, was “hillih”. Or something like that.

I keep thinking that, once she gets older, I will worry less. But I know it’s not true. Soon she’ll be old enough to grab things, and hold them, and swallow them, and suddenly our home will be full of hazards. Then she’ll be able to get around by herself, and there will be even more things that could go wrong.

And when she’s old enough not to swallow things and not to fall over, we’ll worry when she goes out on her bike and doesn’t come back on time.

Then, when she’s old enough to go to university, I’m sure we’ll go back to worrying about her swallowing things and falling over.

I mentioned this to a friend of mine. “How old do your kids get before you stop worrying about what happens to them? About fifty, I suppose”.

“Yes,” he said. “Then they start worrying about you”.