Top of the Week to ya! And this week it’s especially top! Please welcome our first guest poster, Laura Anne! She’s a friend of mine from Bonnie Scotland, who has arranged a special top ten for you this week. If you’d like to read more from this sweet and funny gal, you can check out her blog here! For now it’s on with the show…

Top Ten Ways to Corrupt Your Friend’s Children

So I’ve just spent a week with 2 families on holiday in Cornwall. Enter an almost-5-year-old, a 3-year-old and an 11 month old into my life.

Exit 3 corrupted children…

Amazingly my parenting friends still let me around their children, but if you’d like to have some fun with none of the responsibility like me, here are 10 tips on how you can corrupt your friends’ children. But apply them at your own peril!

10. At a children’s birthday party, teach kids how to eat Milky Ways the ‘proper’ way. Pick off all the chocolate on the outside (sides first, the bottom, then the top last), then eat the soft nougat bit in the middle.

Same principles apply to Jaffa Cakes and Oreos.

In case you're not from the UK, these are Jaffa Cakes! A lovely mess if eaten 'properly.'

9. If you happen to find yourself in a hotel room with your friend’s child – teach them how to throw themselves on/jump on the bed. When parents come in and say “Now no jumping on the bed,” you say “Of course not, no, I would never encourage your child to jump on beds.”

8. Bribe your friends’ daughters into eating their tea (dinner) by offering to paint one of their fingernails or toenails with pink nail varnish for every spoonful they eat.

7. Have many piercings. Kids will ask about them. Then you can tell gory disgusting stories about how each one was done.

6. Entertain babies by rocking out in the form of headbanging with teething toys (noisy ones). By the time they are 18 months old headbanging and moshing will be their preferred methods of dancing and you’ve got the early signs of heavy metal rockstar prodigy right there.

5. Want your friend’s kid to support your football team? Nothing quite like a cute teddy bear dressed in team kit to help them along the way – bear must wear the team scarf. The scarf novelty will make it their favourite bear…and voila…you’ve got another fan!

4. Babysit. With no parents around you can make slides down the stairs with duvets, blow up ready brek in the microwave or get toy lightsabres and re-enact fight scenes from Star Wars.

3. If shopping with children, point out CCTV cameras and tell them that’s ‘elf-vision’…Santa’s preferred method of watching children at all times to see if they should go on his naughty or nice list.

2. Choose your TV programme watching very carefully. If your friend’s kid walks in to find you watching How to Look Good Naked then suddenly you’ll find yourself trying to explain why the lady on the TV thinks she looks hideous and how Gok Wan is trying to help.

1. The ultimate: all children should know we have two stomachs. One for the main course, and the 2nd for puddings and sweeties…but most importantly chocolate and ice cream. That’s why even when kids are ‘full up’ or ‘had enough’ they still have room for pudding!

Thanks for the laughs Laura Anne! And for my American readership, I should note that in the UK ‘pudding’ means any type of dessert, and not just ‘pudding.’