Passing time with trad
If you’re a lover of traditional music, this might be for you. TG4, has a free online player that has a huge amount of Irish music. There are live concerts, programmes and box sets of the series they show on TV.
Now would be a brilliant time to practice Irish together as a family, especially as kids are off school. If yours is very rusty, maybe they can teach you a thing or two!
Available on the player is GradamCeoil, the traditional Irish music awards where you can watch the best Irish musicians perform; Celtic Connections, a Glasgow music festival that celebrates Celtic music; Windmill Lane Sessions which records trad music live from a recording studio in Dublin. Let’s not forget the Fleadh. TG4 has archives of the best bits of the Irish music festival from over the years. There is plenty to keep you feeling cultured and maybe some to get you up and dancing.
Early bed time actually makes kids healthy
An early bed time as well as following a consistent routine before sleep could reduce the risk of children becoming overweight or obese, according to a new study published in Acta Paediatrica.
The study looked at 1,258 Indigenous children from Australia who were age 6 on average. It found that children who went to bed late consistently gained a larger amount of weight over several years compared to those who went to bed early.
Lead author Dr Yaqoot Fatima, of the Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Queensland, and the James Cook University, said: “While we know it can be hard to get children to bed early, and at consistent times both on weekdays and at weekends, it might help parents or carers to know that establishing consistent and early bedtimes may reduce the risk that their child will be overweight or obese.”
Their research shows the importance of taking into account, not just the duration of sleep, but the benefits of an early bedtime for children.
The bane of drains: solved
Have you ever wondered why your shower wasn’t draining properly and realised that there has been a large amount of hair gathering that is just out of reach?
It is a very annoying reason to have to get a plumber in – and definitely not a pleasant job for anyone. You can get a handy little plug – one of the brands are Tubshroom – that fits into your drain and catches any hair before it has a chance to block the pipes. It wraps around the plastic device and is then easily removes and then dumped out. What’s great is that it is also good at catching fine, short hair, like pet hair. If you remove and rinse it after every shower, keeping the drain clean will be much less of a chore than usual.