To the ongoing horror of the resident felines, Helena is a cat person. She loves them, I suspect much more than she loves me. (I base this partially on the fact that she can say 'cat' in two languages, and addresses each cat by its name but she steadfastly refuses to say 'mama'). On the other hand this also means that my presence is not greeted by ear-piercing shrieks of excitement, nor does she habitually try to sit on me or use me as a body pillow, so I will take my breaks where I find them.

Breaks are certainly in short supply with my firstborn, who has an instinctive and powerful grasp of which buttons to push in order to make me and his father incoherent with rage. Largely it's the whining or the laziness; the claims that he is 'too tired to put on socks' and that the problem of putting a shoe on causes him to suffer powerful life angst and lie on the floor weeping. Living with him is like sharing a house with a compact and powerful weather system and spending half your life braced against hurricanes.

I have spent much of the Half-Term break gnashing my teeth and having to be in a separate room to him lest I give in to my impulses and wallop him. On the other hand his repetitive claims that he 'doesn't love me anymore, will never love me again' phase me not at all, largely because I don't give a monkey's. Distance making the heart grow fonder is a profound truism of our relationship, and I harbour hopes for improved relations now that we're not going to be in each other's faces most of the day.

He is a complex creature my son, martyr both to his own despotic character and to being a guinea pig to Z's and mine parenting strategies. Matei is an assault upon the senses and his very own worst ennemy. Yet no sooner has the ink dried upon the 'Free to a good home' sign we aim to hang upon his neck then he says something which undoes us completely - plunges us into mirth or a helpless kind of love that comes with the urge to shelter him from the world and the magnitue of his own feelings.

This morning he burst into our bedroom in a rage, and when he was finished with the shouting and the weeping and the bodily casting himself onto the floor in order to better writhe on it and then changing his mind and casting himself onto the bed to writhe there instead; after Z and I had run through the full gamut of ignoring and cajoling and finally shouting "WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU" - only then was he eventually able to say that the trigger to the whole drama was a dream.

"I dreamt I was big! and I phoned a friend and we got into a car and drove to see you and mummy and then I woke up and I realised that it wasn't real and it made me very very angry."

Dear God, I dread to think what he will be like as an actual teenager.