Before you had a child, a cosy little beach shelter would have been just the thing for a bit of summer nookie with your mistress. But now you’re a father, and your mistress has left you for a man without vomit on his clothing, you’ll be needing a beach shelter to house your gorgeous wife and child on those hot summer days.

Beach Shelta Family UV Beach Tent (£53.99 from Travelling With Children)

Shelta are an Aussie company and should therefore know a thing or two about sun protection. Their UV Beach Tent is self-erecting (snigger, snigger) and takes only seconds to construct. It has sand pockets to keep it firmly rooted to the beach, and also comes with a handy groundsheet so you don’t need to lay towels inside. Unfortunately it costs quite a bit of wonga - much too much when you consider what else is on the market.

Nivea Family Cabana Sun Tent (£39.95 from Jacksons Camping)

A little more reasonably priced is the Family Cabana Sun Tent from Nivea, who are better known for producing sun cream than sun shelters. Their sun-tent is also ‘pop-up’ which means that it will be erect quicker than a teenager in a brothel. Sadly, it doesn’t have an integrated ground sheet so you’ll have to use towels to avoid your little boy getting sandy balls while he crawls around the tent.

Coleman Sundome (£14.99 from Amazon.co.uk)

Can the winner of my sun shelter buying guide really cost only £15? Yes siree Bob! The Coleman Sundome really is a top-notch beach shelter for very little moola. It has the all-important sand pockets for stability, and impressively it has a huge groundsheet that extends far beyond the tent. This provides a really sizeable area to frolic around in, and has the added feature that it can fully zip up to close the dome while you are changing, or perhaps to hide your huge Dadget collection while you’re out at sea. The only downside is that it is not self-erecting – like a married man, it will require a few minutes of careful attention before it is fully erect.

Henry and I have bought a Coleman Sundome and we’ll give you our full review very soon! (Full review now here)

So you’ve had success with your electronic invites and now your house is full of screaming children vomiting peanut butter sandwiches into your DVD player’s disc-tray. Time to settle them all down for a few board games.

But why punish them with complex mental arithmetic when adding up the scores? Sure, you could be generous and give them a calculator to use, but you’d still need pen and paper to write it all down.

So whip out your iPhone and solve the problem by using the EZ Score app. You can keep track of everyone’s score very easily, even having a photo next to each child’s name. For 59 pence (or free for the Lite version that is limited to 3 players) you have become the cool dad with the iPhone who didn’t make his kids practice mathematics when they were supposed to be having fun. Dadgetastic.

If your wife ever asks for proof as to why you should have the latest digital camera then here it is. While this photo may look like a spoonful of vomit being passed between the lips of my unsuspecting little boy, Henry, it actually contains a whole lot more.

We first noticed Henry’s first tooth when feeding him – he opens his little mouth so wide for those first few spoonfuls that you can almost see directly into his stomach. But having any detailed examination of the tooth proved impossible, as he won’t allow anything else in that mouth apart from foul mixtures of bizarre vegetables.

And so here is the cropped version of the photo that allowed us a detailed look at our little man’s first little tooth. You can clearly see the little white stub poking out of his gum, whilst mashed up pig swill clings to the underside of his lip. How cute is that?!