Is it 3am or 5am? I can see the light bleeding through curtains anyway. I am exhausted, up and down all night, part anxiety and part necessity to look after our new wee baby. I try to recall when I ate last, a fork of peanut butter this afternoon? A dry, claggy oatcake as dinner?

The days are both long and all too short to get everything done. I’m unshowered, unmade-up with wilder hair and even wilder clothing combos, favouring whatever I can pull on and off as quickly as possible.

I feel impossibly out of my depth despite hours of rigorous research and the stakes are so very high. Surely it isn’t this hard for everyone?

If you’re a parent you’ll recognise these feelings in the early days well. I do. Except this time round our baby is a 50ft tunnel of steel narrowboat floating on the Thames.

Regular readers might remember that in order to escape the rocketing Glasgow house prices we decided to…buy a boat. Indeed, we did buy a boat.

READ MORE: Kerry Hudson: I've bought a houseboat - what have I done?

The whole family travelled to west Yorkshire (narrowboats are few and far between in Scotland we discovered…) and took a 56ft ex-hire boat for a test drive. We fell in love with it immediately, a shiny blue and red beauty and made an offer.

The price was right and we trusted she’d been well maintained by the owner of the hire fleet so we put our money where our mouths were, paid our 10% deposit, got her craned out of the water and a marine engineer to travel to write mystical chalk marks across the rusty hull which eventually told us…first, our hull should not be rusty and second, it was unsound and would need thousands of pounds of overplating or we’d need to walk away.

So we swallowed the price of the craning and surveying and did as one marine expert advised, ‘run don’t walk away from the boat’.

By this point, the flat we were renting in had already been sold. We were staying in a friend's Shawlands flat but needed to be out by the end of September.

We’d already learned the hard way that it takes many months to buy and survey a boat and that it is, under no circumstances, a process to be rushed.

We cycled through our options – try to find an affordable rent in Glasgow willing to take pets and a toddler? Maybe we could take our whole family on a ferry across to Amsterdam and interrail through Europe? Should we get a sublet by the seaside?

And then, it must have hurt when he fell from heaven, the writer John O’Farrell sent me a message on X (formerly twitter): Would we like to loan his boat until spring? We could have it for free and take it where we wanted from its home mooring in Oxford.

READ MORE: Kerry Hudson: Every Scot should be able to afford a healthy diet

And so we became new parents. Congratulations! It’s a sturdy steel 1990 boat in fine fettle. We had thought we were prepared but, like new parenthood, until you are in the thick of it, you cannot prepare yourself for diddly squat.

Our task as new parents of our precious cargo was slightly more onerous because in order to reach our moorings where we’d stay until April we needed to beat the clock in the world’s slowest amazing race by getting our boat from Oxford to Chertsey, 81 miles and 29 locks, within four days before winter repairs or the lock gates fell into the river – whichever happened first.

Boats are like babies in that they require almost constant attention. As with newborns, when they are moving you are with them. We woke at dawn and sailed until nightfall.

One of us was always at the tiller steering, constantly vigilant for any strange noises or grizzles from the engine, our tea going cold on the roof as we shouted to the other through the open hatch that we needed a pee or please could someone shove a muesli bar in our mouths before we passed out.

During the days, I worried, as I think most mothers do about whether people thought I was doing a good job.

I was eternally grateful to people who reassured us we would get there, that we were doing fine. For the kindness of strangers, most of whom had been new boaters themselves, who helped us in a tricky windy mooring when I was in a blind panic and who brought us strong coffee and our toddler a Distraction Ice-cream when she heard we’d been cruising for 10 hours.

At nights, when we were fit to drop, there was still more to be done – electrics and gas and the water pump needed to be turned off, our dining table magically changed into a double bed (our toddler had his own cabin adorned with pirate bunting).

It was while I was awake in the wee hours, wondering what that strange noise could be, anxiously consulting internet forums about our slightly sticky throttle, going outside in my bare feet and pyjamas to check our baby was securely fastened with the rope hitches I’d only learned the day before, that I realised that the last time I felt like this was when my little boy was brand new, curled against my chest just as he’d curled in my womb and everything felt beautiful, exhausting and overwhelming.

By the third day we learned that our newborn days ethos worked just as well with our new boat - as long as we were kind to each other and were all alive at the end of each day it had been a triumph.

In the morning we woke with the sunrise, streaking over the wide river. The only sound was the dawn chorus and the swans at our hatch who’d learned to peck at the side of the boat at breakfast time.

We sat at our little dining table, looked out at the utter beauty of the countryside, drank a hot coffee and then stepped on deck to start another physical, practical, tiring day full of accomplishment and wonder.