I started making smoothies for myself and my husband BC (before children) when we were working hard to renovate our house and living on takeaways, due to either lack of time or lack of kitchen!

I decided that if we could at least start the day with a few portions of fruit, we wouldn’t have to feel so guilty about alternating between pizza, curry and the chip shop in the evening.

Fast forward a few years and the smoothie has come into its own again as a great way of how to get kids to eat fruit.

The only difference now is that a growing family brings with it extra food and an abundance of plastic cups, pots and plates, meaning that kitchen space is somewhat limited compared with previous child-free days.

As a result, the all-singing, all-dancing multipurpose food processor is now stuck in repose behind several lunch boxes and an Annabel Karmel hand blender.

So I was really pleased to stumble on the Indulgence Mini Smoothie Maker MIMS10, available through Amazon, which fits neatly under my wall units when it’s in use and takes up very little cupboard space when it’s not.

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Yes it’s that time of year again when the supermarkets stock up with factor 50 at £3 a tube and then promptly sell out, only for us to end up scouring the shelves religiously every week in the hope that we won’t have to splash out three times the amount for the one with a brand name on it. Or is that just me?

I am pretty forgetful at the best of times, but trying to get myself and two small children (and sometimes a dog and husband) ready for a day out is the worst of times when it comes to remembering all the essentials.

One essential I refuse to be without in the summer months, though, is the children’s sun cream.

To make sure I am never caught short, I tend to buy three or four affordable bottles from the supermarket so that I can keep one in the house, one in every bag and one in the car, saving me from having to pay through the nose at the beach shop.

According to Cancer Research UK, cheaper sun protection products are usually just as good as the more expensive ones, and my personal view is that if it is formulated for babies, it’s a safe bet that it will offer ultra-high protection with minimal irritants, making it mild enough for us all to use on our faces as well as bodies whenever we need it.

Here are some other tips from Cancer Research UK for staying safe in the sun:

* Put sun cream on before you go out in the sun.

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As a part-time working mother, I often find that the days I spend with my children each week creep up and jump out at me from behind the wall of organised chaos that is my busy working life, usually without me having had a moment to think ahead and formulate any sensible ideas of what we might do together.

So when this week the dog decided to, shall we say, do her ‘evening business’ on the bed instead of in the garden, the activity for most of the following ‘Mummy day’ sort of planned itself – a trip to the laundrette.

Despite the daunting thought of getting a wayward preschooler, baby in pram and king-size duvet out of the car, across a busy road and up two steps to reach the king-size washing machines, I decided to do my best to make it into a positive experience.

Remembering Topsy and Tim and other such stories where a trip to the supermarket/hospital/daddy’s office was almost as exciting as a trip to Legoland, I figured a room full of enormous washing and drying machines had the potential to be something of an adventure in the eyes of a preschooler.

And I wasn’t wrong – her eyes widened as we approached, and the tumbling clothes and smell of washing powder on the warm, dry air made it feel like we were stepping into another world.

After an initial jaw-dropping moment of speechlessness, I was met with an outpouring of previously hidden knowledge about washing machines, coin slots, powder drawers, drains and dryers – turns out she had seen a visit to a laundrette on CBeebies…

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New Children’s books World of Happy is the title of author/illustrator Giles Andreae’s new thirteen book series, which includes stories about a tortoise that plays football, a drum playing pink cricket, an elephant that befriends a spider, two lovely wales, belching sharks, dancing hippos and a knitting gorilla.

Each of the thirteen stories introduces a different animal dealing with a different emotion such as love, happiness, courage, trust, manners and teamwork.

Giles Andreae is responsible for popular children’s books including Pants, Giraffes Can’t Dance, Rumble in the Jungle, Commotion in the Ocean and The Lion Who Wanted Love.

His stories are imbued with a brilliant sense of humour and his written rhymes are fun to read as well as listen to. The illustrations are quirky and colourful, and there is always a lesson to be learned by each of Andreae’s characters.

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Growing sperm in a lab – it sounds a little… strange but scientists have figured out how to do it.

The Guardian recently reported on this new male fertility breakthrough. A research team from Japan that has successfully managed to create lab-grown sperm using fragments of testes bathed in nutrients.

The team from Yokohama City University then used the developed sperm to fertilise eggs, from which healthy, fertile young were born.

Here’s the catch; the engineered sperm was created with mouse tissue. Mouse sperm is certainly not human sperm, as you may have realised.

The point is that species-specific differences in biology means that what works for one species may not work for another – a point reiterated by Dr Allan Pacey, a senior lecturer in andrology at the University of Sheffield.

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