It's a Dad's Life. Adam Brophy. The Elder has the chicken pox. She is, however, one of the lucky few who seem to get a few sores on their face and body and then run around happily spreading it to the four corners.

Of course she can't be released out into the wild with her peers, so she is sitting on the couch issuing orders with the composure of one born to giving rather than receiving instruction.

It's all my friend's fault. The guilty mother consciously took her three rugrats into an infected household in the belief that this was as good a time as any for the kids to get all plagued up. Maybe it was, for them, but they could have consulted my schedule before letting their possibly diseased brood roam free among my pristinely healthy and untarnished wee girlies. If we're looking at booking in our kids for diseases, I would have quite happily waited until the fourth quarter of the year.

Right now, being ordered around by my fit-but-for- a-mild-speckling child is not helping my already suspiciously high stress levels.

The ogre in me wishes she was properly sick. She's a good patient when she's really wrecked. She'll lie there all day and snooze the badness out of her.

I can cope with the excretions and the increase in washing provided she stays still and doesn't demand much beyond two litres of flat 7-Up and the occasional sympathetic cluck. It's this non-sick illness that gets me worked up.

Right now, to free me up for a full day's work, I have enlisted my mother to cope with her granddaughter's demands. I can hear her being sent on regular missions to the kitchen for more munchies, which the child would never get away with if her parents were holding the reins. My mother, never the strictest of disciplinarians, is putty in the Elder's hands.

Even the Younger knows that if she asks she will receive, when Granny is around.

So, thanks to my disease-spreading friends, I have a sick child who's not really sick presiding over two generations of servants while another nipper is most likely incubating the virus until her sister is well before unleashing her lesions on the world. The Missus is ringing regularly from the comfort of her sanitised office to offer condolences and add to my instructions, when all I want her to do is come home and take over.

I've come to the conclusion, after nearly six years' involvement, that I'm just not particularly good at this parenting lark. When the going is smooth, hey, I'm your man. I can play in the park, help choose DVDs, read books and I'm a dab hand at the old tickle monster terror. But throw me a curve ball and I go running for Mammy.

Back at the start, whenever the most minor of illnesses (and they are constant) appeared, I broke out in a flop sweat. Now the child has to approach 104 on the thermometer before I consider paying them any extra attention, unless there are obvious physical manifestations - such as for the pox. You simply can't ignore the pox.

When that first child is born and you're overwhelmed with puppy love, you swear you'll lay down your life for them, you'll never make the same mistakes your parents made, they'll be your number one priority no matter what and they'll grow up saying how wonderful their parents are.

Then, with time and the unending onslaughts that are children, you come to your senses and begin to suspect that these routine medical hiccups are simply ploys they have developed to annoy you. It's a cunning plan to wind you up.

Now, summer is here and school is finished. I will tolerate no illness in my house until September because I, Adam Brophy, formerly an individual in his own right and not just a whipping boy for under-sixes, want to have a good time. Any infractions will be dealt with severely.