With their second child together due later this month, Kevin Federline told Ellen DeGeneres on her eponymous talk show Wednesday that wife Britney Spears’s cravings are “not too bad” compared to a year ago, before the birth of son Sean Preston. 

“Ice chips all the time,” he said about Spears’s favorite snack – admitting that he had to ask his mother what that was all about, and she couldn’t adequately explain it to him, either.

What he does understand, however, is that at age 28 he likes being a young father.

“My father was young with me,” says Federline, who, besides Sean Preston, is also dad to daughter, Kori, 4, and son Kaleb, 2 (their mother is actress Shar Jackson). “He was, like, 22. I had a good relationship with my father. He was able to keep up with me.”

He also swore to DeGeneres that he does not know the gender of his and Spears’s soon-to-be arrival.

As for being measured against his wife’s immense professional success, the aspiring rap star said it’s been tough. “I think the expectation is real high for me, you know,” said Federline. “It’s like you see my wife, here she is this huge superstar, everybody loves her, all of her music is just hit, hit, hit after hit, and it’s hard to compete.”

Even so, he said, “I don’t see it as a competition. Maybe other people are putting it in that perspective, but I don’t see it like that at all. I just have fun. I love rapping and making music. Period.”

Next month, Federline will make his acting debut on CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, playing an arrogant teen who gets in the way of forensic agents Nick Stokes (George Eads) and Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan).

“They called when I was doing Teen Choice (Awards) rehearsals, and I said, ‘Yes.’ There was no way I’d turn that down,’” he said. And though he thought he was “pretty good” on the show, he said he still prefers rapping to acting.

Next goal: giving up smoking, he promised Ellen, who reminded him how bad second-hand smoke would be for the baby.