As I feared, Nicco has started showing signs of distress. He is biting his fingernails with gusto—a sure indicator of stress which he has ‘inherited’ from me—and trying to attract attention by misbehaving. If he gets reprimanded, he either becomes aggressive or oversensitive—once, he even told me: “No one loves me any more,” which very nearly broke my heart. Apparently, though, it is good that he can articulate his distress rather than bottling it all up, so I am trying to encourage him to do so. Yesterday, I also kept him home and played with him the whole day. Hide and seek, knights and villains, archery, running, football, reading stories—we did it all (thankfully, Caterina sleeps most of the time).

Niccolo the archer

At the end of it, he seemed to be a lot more cheerful and hardly misbehaved at all, to the point that we decided to go out for a meal, as he wanted to eat fish, and there is no way I am going to cook the thing at home (not that I would know how to, having a deep-set diffidence towards all food coming from the sea).

It was Caterina’s first restaurant outing, at the grand old age of 16 days, and she slept through it all. Niccolo, on the other hand, had a whale of a time. He thoroughly enjoyed his grilled seabass and even ate a plateful of fried courgettes, thanks to Manfredi’s inspired white lie, which passed them off as whitebait. I had long suspected Nicco’s aversion to all vegetables except peas was more psychological than real, and this is proof. I am now going to serve fried ‘fake whitebait’ at regular intervals and see what happens.

More importantly, though, the meal out really seemed to restore his good mood, and this morning he went to nursery school without a peep. I am not deluding myself that this is the end of his difficult time, but hopefully grown-up things like going to the restaurant, in which Caterina can’t really participate, can help soften the blow.