While there are many parents who may dread the summer holidays, I actually love it because – gratefully childfree – I get to be Super Fun Aunt Mimi and hang out with my gorgeous Niblings while my sister is at work.

At nine and seven her children are at the brilliant age of engaging intelligence and curiosity, with a huge amount of energy and enough independence to clear the table, tidy away games, create treasure maps and manage their own ablutions. This past week has been an utterly exhausting but wonderfully rewarding week of lessons for all three of us:

• If you get them to choose their favourite tune to get dressed to, you can have both of them with teeth brushed and ready to go in the three and a half minutes of Ride by Twenty One Pilots.

• The prepacked trays of sushi in Waitrose are excellent (but wincingly expensive) idea for lunch. Make it educational by watching the chef roll and chop the seaweed wrapped maki rolls.

• The library is an amazing place for kids – full of cute reading nooks, a table with a chess board, plenty of computers, an imaginatively decorated children’s section and a thousand piece jigsaw in progress for anyone to join in with. We just popped in to see what we could do and ended up there for more than three hours, leaving a very triumphantly completed jigsaw on the table.

• Sushi can only be left out of the fridge for two hours.

• The walk back to Waitrose for a second attempt at a food-poison free lunch will induce a significant amount of whiny protest. 

• The helpful orange line on the Strava map helps motivate them to keep moving (and running around in massive circles if you need a bit of that too). 

• Now the boy is 9 years old, he refuses to hold hands with a grown up when crossing the road, but will hold his little sister’s hand so you can still manage a fully attached crossing.

• The ‘Shadow bus’ is an unbelievably annoying game in which they both try to ‘ride’ your shadow on the pavement, which is all very fun and manageable until the sun is directly behind you. Try not swear at that point.

• It takes 51 of the girl’s hiccups to walk across the park, not the measly 30 that I had guessed. 

• Materteral means ‘Pertaining to, or in the manner of, an aunt.’

• Make a visit to a cafe more interesting by getting the kids to write the TripAdvisor review.

• A small errand at Timpsons can become an exciting adventure in which the kids choose the design of the new key and watch the lovely man take a ‘photocopy’ of the old one. 

• Take great care in agreeing who will use the new key upon arrival home because being the second person to open the door once they key has already been used DOESN’T COUNT Aunt Mimi! 

• Jigsaw races. Such a genius idea. Get two equally sized puzzles, create sufficient space for both and set each child puzzling against each other. 500 pieces each takes a splendidly focused three hours. 

• Kenilworth Castle provides a whole day’s worth of energetic and educational entertainment. We were told stories by a lady dressed as a bear (with her ragged staff), explored the red stony ruins, ate English Heritage cake, ran among the gorgeous gardens, watched the cute little partridges and spent an animated hour in the games room of the gatehouse compete with an exact replica Minecraft version of the castle, plenty of royal fancy dress options (for adults too) and a royal ‘guess who’ (in which I was momentarily alarmed to see a KING CNUT’ in a children’s game). 

• There is a free dice app you can download in case a game is missing its dice (the boy will find it on your phone for you).

• Most Studio Ghibli films are weirdly unsettling – what the actual fuck is going on in Spirited Away? – but Totoro is safe.

• The kids love hanging up the laundry as a team, with Donovan’s ‘I love my shirt’ as an appropriately enjoyable soundtrack. 

• There is a magic and wonder that creeps back into your adult mind while hanging out with children, and you will share in their curious exploration of important matters like how much a live pig would cost (£60 in fact), your nephew’s favourite bone on his body (collarbone naturally), how long it takes buddlia buds to bloom, the exact height of a castle wall, if there is such a thing as a pescavegan (there is now), how long a nettle sting lasts, why Merlin didn’t just tell Arthur that Gwinevere was under a spell when she kissed that other guy, and how much of the dining room would be taken up by a walrus.

• Hand sanitiser is a good thumb-sucking deterrent. 

• Children don’t understand that adventures can only begin once Aunt Mimi has had coffee. Try to gulp one down before they wake up.

• By far one of the most adventurous and satisfying activities you can do with a nine and seven year old on a rainy day indoors is make a mini action movie on your phone, complete with villain (in a Halloween costume), dungeon (the garage), evil weapon (a lava lamp) and quest to find the kidnapped sister (sprints around the garden). Allow half an hour for arguing about plot and casting, three hours for filming multiple takes around the house (including a lunch scene crow-barred into the plot to make full use of toast and cheese time), two hours of editing with all three of us huddled (and arguing) around the laptop and six minutes to beam at the excitement and pride in everyone’s faces as we played it for their parents.

• You will spend all day looking forward to 5pm when the parents will return but you’ll find you don’t really want to stop hanging out with your amazing niblings and will curl up watching cartoons with them instead of taking the nap you have needed all day. 

• Do not think you can do anything else during a week of childcare. You might receive a text message at 9am and realise you still haven’t replied at 11pm, once dinner and bedtime and tidying up is complete, and you also won’t really care. 

• You will be joyously surprised by just how much your heart can spill over with a fascinatingly intense and beautifully energising unconditional love for two small and miraculous humans.