Seasonal inspiration
1 Invest in a grapefruit knife. A nifty knife makes it so much easier to get the segments loose and up your citrus fruit intake.
2 Have you tried golden milk? Indians swear by it. Mix pinches of turmeric, cinnamon and ground ginger into milk and serve warm. Add some honey for the children.
3 July is statistically the coldest month of the year. Make a weather chart and show your child how you measure the temperature and put it on the chart.
4 Camp out in front of your fireplace on a weekend night. Drag your mattresses and duvets there. Fun, and oh, so warm.
5 Enjoy a bath by candlelight with your children.
6 Introduce your children to curry. Order butter chicken and basmati rice from your local Indian restaurant. It doesn’t burn at all, but the flavours are wonderful.
7 Make a clove orange to hang in the kitchen. Simply stick a whole lot of cloves in an orange. It smells wonderful.
8 Buy lots of stickers and a plastic flip file to keep your child busy on a rainy day.
9 Show your children how to squeeze and roll an orange until the inside is soft. Then make a hole and suck all the juice out of your home-made “juice box”.
10 Read Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story The Snow Queen to your children. Let them draw a picture of her afterwards.
11 July is the seventh month of the year. Spend it looking for the number 7 wherever you go. Do the same for August and the number 8.
12 Lie in bed and laugh at silly cat videos. Try catsofinstagram for starters.
13 Tell your family you’re going to gym, and then go and have a good session in the sauna or steam room instead.
14 Tell your children what a wunderkind (a child prodigy) is. Then play them Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s ballet The Snowman. He wrote it when he was 11 years old.
15 Write Dad a heartwarming note and pop it in his jacket pocket before work for him to discover later.