If it’s your child’s first Christmas, or even second for that matter, you’ll currently be wondering what to buy him/her for Santa’s big day. Family and friends will be showering your little prince/princess with toys, clothes, things that make a mess, things that make a noise, so how can you top that? If you’re a practical scrooge then you might be so brave as to not buy anything at all – after all, what does a 1 year old know about receiving Christmas presents anyway – but if you take this route you risk feeling guilty for the rest of your life. And if your child ever discovers that you never bought anything for his/her first Christmas, then I am sure you can imagine the repercussions. Luckily, I am here to help you avoid such pain and suffering.

My top tip is that you pay a visit to the Royal Mint website where you can buy your child a lovely gift that will be treasured for decades (or until your ungrateful brat needs to raise some money to buy a new pair of trainers). There are some cracking ideas to suit all budgets, and coins are shiny and metallic so they just happen to fit most Dadget criteria (apart from the lack of batteries).

£5 will buy you a presentation-cased £5 coin for the London 2012 Olympics, while £9.99 will buy a presentation set of UK coins from 1 p to £1 in perfect 2009 condition. £19.99 adds a few special £2 coins to the 2009 collection together with a special baby-themed folder. For larger budgets there is the £65 baby-themed gold bullion quarter sovereign, the £112.50 half sovereign and the £199 sovereign.

So there is clearly a gleaming coin for every pocket, and they also make great Christening and birthday gifts too – either for your own child or somebody else’s. On second thoughts, you need to buy other people’s kids those messy and noisy presents, so keep the cool coins to yourself.

I’m not a fan of party-planning myself, possibly linked to a dream I once had involving Margaret Thatcher and a bowl of car keys, but I feel that a few good Dadgets will see me through anything. Having children means that you’ll end up arranging countless parties, so what are the Dadgets to look out for?

Let’s start with the invitations. Why waste money and rainforests on paper invites when you can plan the whole shindig online for free? There is a wide range of party planning web sites that will allow you to send e-invites to your event and then monitor the RSVPs as they come rolling in electronically.

Evite is possibly the most famous such web site, but their homepage is too busy for my liking and they have a bad reputation for saturating the whole experience with too many advertisements. I liked the look of PurpleTrail as an elegant and feature-packed solution, until I discovered that they don’t allow you to do anything from a Mac web browser – tut, tut, tut.

So my choice of online invite services has to be pingg due to its simple interface and support for all web browsers. Yes, it does have advertisements, but they are not very intrusive, and the way that you can integrate photos, web links and even YouTube videos is pretty cool. I’m currently helping my wife to plan Henry’s Christening and pingg is definitely my tool of choice.