For all that is great and good about parenthood, you can’t deny that it requires a lot of preparation and brainwork to ensure variety for your kids. It’s all too easy to sit them in front of the telly for hours on end, or throw them into a local ball pool and hope for the best. And with half term looming large on the calendar, like a gorilla at the top of a hill, coming up with things to do can become a challenge of Olympic proportions.
So, enter stage left the Olympic rower Alex Gregory with a boatload of solutions. His book Dadventures comes out at the end of the month, and has been designed specifically for fathers looking to make the most of their dadding time.
The book is split into different sections, all centred of suggested activities, be it things you can do after-school (a simple treasure hunt), or bite-size bonding moments that take up to 30 minutes (track animals, build a kite), all the way to entire days out, or even overnight stays in homemade dens. It very much has an outdoorsy dad in mind, one with lots of get-up-and-gusto, keen to teach his kids the old-fashioned arts of stargazing, or foraging. Or wild swimming, or fishing with a makeshift rod.
In that sense, it’s possibly not quite the bible an urban gent, shackled to the metropolis, will be looking for. But if you have some greenery nearby, and enough fuel left in the tank, Dadventures is brimming with great ideas, and is written with a real sense of passion and enthusiasm for parenthood, with an emphasis on creating wonderful family memories together.
In fact, worst case scenario – you could always read it while they watch Paw Patrol.
Recommended.