Empty rooms always look bland. We just had to replace our fridge yesterday and in preparation had to empty the counters and move the floor rugs and it was surprising what a difference that made. I would definitely put a piece of trim above the cabinets - either wood or ceiling color would be fine. It would be fine to paint the cabinets (both or just the lowers) but before making plans I'd think about how it would look with the other stuff that goes in your kitchen. This is family-specific - are there colored canisters, or a brightly colored stand mixer or coffeemaker or toaster that stay out, or curtains and throw rugs that add color, or... I wouldn't be in any rush to change things other than the trim because it's not bad, just bland. After living with it for a bit, I might go with my preference for farmhouse and paint the cabinets white, or do white on top and a color on the bottom. I love color - we don't have white walls anywhere - but I'd be fine with the neutral backsplash and counter because it lets me change the colors of other things.

I had joint pain that got a lot better when my allergies were under control. My allergist said that I had a ton of general inflammation because they were really bad. Recently I've had pain in my hips. For other reasons, I started taking the probiotic Provitalize and also fish oil and the pain is much better. It kind of irritates me that I started both at the same time so that I don't know which helped the pain. That's not why I started taking them so I hadn't been expecting that as a result, and now I'm stuck taking both. 🙂 But, I don't hurt much any more, so I can't complain. I hope that you figure it out.

I saw Ezzo being used as a guide with a friend and also a relative. Both were in mainline churches - one Presbyterian, the other Methodist. I don't know that it was a big church-wide push - in both cases, I think that maybe a small group/Sunday School class read the book and the families did it. I don't know how strictly the families followed all of it the beginning, and for various reasons neither family continued with this approach as the kids got older. Their kids are now mostly grown and their families seem to be in a very different place. It didn't seem to correlate with political ideology - one of these is fairly conservative, while the other had 'resist' posted the day after the 2016 election. Both worked part-time from the time that their kids were fairly young (maybe 6 months - 1 year?) so they had some day care or mothers helper/sitter interactions so there's no way that they could have followed all of it strictly. But, with that being said, I had never heard of Gothard, IBLP, Ezzo, etc from my own circles (relative and friend were not in the same state as me) until I saw criticisms on message boards when I was pregnant. I had heard of Dobson but hadn't read much. Churches that I was involved in (multiple states) were more likely to be 'Love and Logic' places. I never got into any particular philosophy. I was fortunate to be in a church where I was adopted by a lot of grandparent-age people, and I took whatever snippets of advice seemed applicable. Some of the best advice that I ever got was 'Unless it's a safety issue, don't invest much time in dealing with a behavior that they'll outgrow quickly'. In other words, limit how much time you spend teaching them to not pull out all of the tupperward, since that phase will be over in a few months. Focus on not running into the road - that's both a safety problem and a long-term issue.

I lived in GA for 5 years and have lived in GA-adjacent states for another 25 and have never heard of this. I wouldn't be surprised that people don't necessarily crawl around on the ground to find a dropped chicken bone, but I've never seen anybody intentionally throw food scraps of any kind on the ground.

My mom and I both had it and found that what helped was very individualized, likely due to the specific shapes of people's feet. For her, she wore one brand of tennis shoes almost continuously for over a year. At one point she slept in them because it kept her feet from pointing at night. I wore birkenstocks every day, all day. When I got it a second time I wore oofos in the house and birks out of the house. Once the pain eased off, after months, we were able to add other styles of shoes occasionally. We would occasionally find other shoes that worked - usally vionic or clarks. If it makes you feel more optimistic, it's been at least 5 years since either of us has had any problem, and I'm back to wearing my flip flops and being barefoot all summer. The biggest help was staying off our feet when possible and stretching multiple times each day.

We know people with names like Max, Jake, and Betsy as their given names. It's what their family planned to call them, so they skipped naming them Jacob or Elizabeth and just went with the nickname. They are related, and since it happened over generations they seem to feel like it keeps things simple.

I think that rhetoric did a lot of damage to how people view each other. In many instances, instead of the discussion being 'I don't think the cost-benefit on this policy makes this a worthwhile policy' and the response being 'I think that the policy is worthwhile for reason X, supported by data Y' with similar back and forth, it devolved to 'you're killing people' and 'you don't care about people'. These can be applied to both sides of many policies - this isn't meant to be partisan. But, statements like these are hard to come back from on a relationship level, and ultimately relationships are what makes society work. I know people who left organizations that they had been a part of for decades, not over disagreement, but over how people talked to each other. People also lost the ability to 'work in groups' and some seem to be unable to turn off the 'must protect my family' mentality that they developed. With covid policy being less of an issue, that intensity is being directed at anybody who disagrees with them on anything, anywhere. People who run groups locally are struggling to deal with the extent to which people want everything individualized. It's been interesting to watch. Here, the least disrupted thing was kids athletics. And, the place where I'm seeing the least change in behavior is kid athletics. It's like...people never got out of the groove of how to do this, so they're trucking along like it's 2019, while other aspects of life that were more disrupted are struggling more. I think we also developed an understanding that the fact that our various groups and activities don't just spontaneously happen. I think that people have been shocked at how hard it has been to rebuild groups that were once very important to people. All it takes is a little turnover and you have an entirely different thing. I think we're going to see odd effects in the future because different places handled things so differently. The learning gaps aren't just going to be economic, they'll be geographic. Schools in some areas were closed for 2 months in spring of 2020, while others were closed for a year. Even within some states there were huge differences. I don't know how that will affect future college classes and employment situations. I think we're in a weird situation where we simultaneously realized that we need to get healthier while instead we got less healthy. We aren't good at fixing this long-term problem, but hopefully as individuals people will try to move towards better health.

It's hard to have strict lines, but for me there are some indicators that I consider to be more cult-like. First, is there secrecy - are there hidden rules or special knowledge only available to the 'elite' within the group or are the beliefs or rules clearly laid out for everybody to see? Most mainstream religions have texts or teachings that are available to anybody, and in earlier times had public teaching or letters that circulated. Is there room for question and debate? Can people disagree or have doubt? The Old Testament has stories of people who 'wrestled with God' and it's portrayed as an OK thing to do. Can people leave? Obviously people may think you are wrong, but do they prevent you from leaving or threaten you? Do you have control over how you participate? This is made more complicated by the fact that small groups can do weird things to a more mainstream belief system. And, anything that is important to people may take a lot of their time and resources, and that can make people uncomfortable. Like, nobody thinks twice if you spend time and $ on a kid's extracurricular or the local theater company or if a wealthy person donates huge sums to build a museum, but if somebody does the same thing with a religious group then people may wonder if it's a cult. But, on the other hand, people clearly do end up in cults and unhealthy religious groups that take over their lives in negative ways. Other people happily spend many hours working with their religious group to study in a way that benefits their life or volunteer in ways that serve others. But, I tend to think that in a healthy group people are free to choose when, where, and how to participate.

I had an emergency C-section after many hours of labor. When they finally wheeled me into a room, there was a breakfast plate - bacon, eggs, pancakes. I'm not sure I was supposed to have eaten so soon after surgery, but I did, and it was good. For the second, it was a semi-scheduled C-section (one of those 'if you haven't had a baby by 10 days past your due date' situations). They didn't bring breakfast that time - it was a different hospital. I'm not sure if my first real meal was lunch or if they gave me jello and didn't let me eat a real meal until dinner. At any rate, that hospital was big on feeding women beef post-birth - steak for dinner, steak sandwiches for lunch, so whatever meal it was, I had beef. Baby and I were in the hospital 5 days the first time, and the best meal was when my mom brought chicken salad sandwiches. They are a multipurpose food for my family - we eat the on the beach, at weddings, at funerals, at showers and luncheons - and it was the ultimate comfort food.

Under these circumstance, I'd likely be hesitant to continue to spend money on college, too. I know that there were challenges at each school, but there are always going to be challenges - this isn't a case of one poor grade due to a messed up assignment. I think that a break from school, coupled with independence, would probably be a huge help. Much of the issue could be due to the dad's control issues, but I think that the best path forward is to get some successes - a certification, a job, an apartment or sublet room, and some autonomy would give her some space. There is unlikely to be a direct path to nursing with those grades, but there are many other health care fields - EMT, radiology tech, phlebotomist - that could be starting points. I agree that she's unlikely to know how to make this happen, and mom scaffolding - looking for programs, helping her to sign up, looking for a sublet, etc - needs to happen. If mom can't get $, she might be able to help daughter find a regular job to help fund things while working out how to do a certification in something medical. Meanwhile, the interactions with dad are not good. Feeling like a parent would be angry or disappointed or frustrated is normal - parents experience all of those things - and it's natural enough to dread having those conversations. Feeling like they would despise the child, and actually fearing the parent, is not. Counseling seems like a good idea for anybody in that situation.

When I was in school 30 years ago there weren't activities planned by RAs in the dorms. We kept our doors open or sat in the halls or lounge areas or outside on benches so that people spoke (which didn't necessarily lead anywhere, but sometimes they chatted, which sometimes led to getting to know each other better). Even if he doesn't make a friend, are there things that would occupy his time - going to the gym/rec center/pool, for instance, would take an hour or more and if he sees the same people day after day he might get to know them. Or could he get a job? It would fill some time and he'd have coworkers to get to know. Even a job like dishwasher in a lab would put him around people. I spent 2 summers working at camps on my undergrad campus, and summer was definitely calmer...which is fine once you know people. Even with that, both summers were times when I spent an hour solo walking for exercise - I explored nearby neighborhoods and took different routes just for something to do. And the most lonely stretch of time I ever spent was the summer that I had an internship at UVA. A friend from high school who went there (but wasn't there over the summer) said that, unlike my alma mater, it was a place where people didn't really talk unles they were introduced. So, I worked but was mostly alone nights and weekends. It wasn't fun, but it also had an end, as will summer school. But, at my undergrad school, people were very friendly and the school still has that reputation. But, even then, I met people in part because I made an effort to do things - I ate and worked out with coworkers when I worked at camp, went to dollar movies that I didn't care about with hallmates, asked neighbors or classmates if they were going to the ball game, etc.

Playing around with Life of Fred can help keep the algebra skills sharp. Kids either love it or hate it, but if he likes it then I'd go for it. It does make a good review. Number Theory is a different kind of math. He might also like something like Mathematics, a human endeavor - it never lined up for my kids to use it, but it covers some different material. If he doesn't like math, don't use AoPS for the normal subjects - it's a lot of challenge.

Different choices will lead to different outcomes, and you can't know what the outcome will be. And if one doesn't turn out like you had hoped, you can't know that making a different choice would have led to a better outcome. But, unless there is more that we don't know, the choices won't be wrong, just different. We know people who choose to go out of town every weekend. They drift away from the church because they don't feel connected...which they won't, because they don't actually go there routinely except during the winter. But, they have other relationships where they go on the weekends. It's not really possible to be close to 2 groups if you're only interacting with one of them. But it's not right or wrong, better or worse, it's just a different set of relationships.

8th grade won't be on a high school transcript so nobody will see what he did. My kid's transcripts just list 'high school courses taken prior to 9th grade' without listing the grade in which they were taken. A couple of thoughts - will your student do algebra 1, algebra 2, gap year, geometry, and then precalc? Our local STEM school either swapped geometry back to being between the algebras or added significant review because the kids forgot a lot of algebra during geometry, so I wondered if it might be an issue for there to be 2 years between algebra 2 and precal. With my older, kid simultaneously worked through Life of Fred algebra while doing geometry (between the 2 algebras) to keep it fresh. We were doing AoPS in middle and spent 1.5 years on some courses, so we chose to do AoPS Number Theory and Counting and Probabiility to fill in some gap semesters. Kid really liked Number Theory, in case it would be a good fit for your student. At any rate, I would not assign 3 algebra credits for algebra done in middle school - multiple credits are sometimes given for high schoolers who need more than a year to cover the standard material, but for a student taking them in middle school I think it would look strange.

I teach many classes myself, and we do others at co-op. The only online providers that we've used are Derek Owens, Fundafunda (full transparency - I teach there, and many of the teachers are local people who teach at our co-op - we take their classes live, but if the co-op schedule doesn't work, we sometimes take them online), and the community college for DE. All of our online classes have been reasonably taught. But, the experience and independence vary by kid. Some have tight deadlines and others are more self-paced. Kids interact with those differently. One of my kids was able to be very independent by sometime in middle school, and the occasional 'Is your work done?' was enough to keep kid on track. My other does very little with a self-paced class unless there are parent-set deadlines and check-ins to make sure that the work is done every week. Kid doesn't do a great job of managing time when there are multiple deadlines, so I have to help kid think through things like 'you can't do a week's worth of math and read 1/2 of a book for English in one day'. I don't think either of my kids could have been fully independent when starting middle school, but I started working towards autonomy in elementary and hand over control gradually as the kids get older and are ready for it.

Lots of public school kids come from schools that have block schedules, which, like college schedules, have 4ish classes each semester. Plenty of homeschool and public/private school kids take DE classes. I'd expect that colleges are used to seeing students with courses in the spring of their senior year because they can't take everything in the fall, either for sequencing or scheduling reasons. If you choose to add another science class, I'd pick something other than physics since that would be repetitive - geology or something like that. Not that you need to, but if you decided that you want another science I'd pick something where your student would actually learn something new.

We don't have anything exciting going on, but it will be busy. Older will be a senior next year and will likely start on college application essays and SRAR stuff. Kid is taking an online DE class and is working on a homegrown computing class (spouse is a computer engineer and directs this) and possibly reading books that I'll turn into a history 1/2 credit elective. Kid will start working on his Eagle project and will have workouts for baseball 2x/week at the school and probably some independent ones at a local sports club. If the weather is good we'll have 7 weekends of summer baseball tournaments. Kid has told the high school coach to let him know if local tournaments need paid scorekeepers on days that there isn't a conflict with his games, so he may pick up some cash doing that. The high school is hosting a few days of baseball camp for younger kids so the team will probably be working at that as a fundraiser. We live on a couple of acres and have a huge garden, so we may pay kid to do some yard stuff. Kid also likes to go to the open gym at church every Thursday night and play a few hours of basketball - it conflicts with baseball during the school year but is a summer favorite. We had debated encouraging kid to get a summer job, but between AP and DE kid is on track to be able to do college in 3 years (or work towards a masters if he stays longer). Since kid is interested and able it makes more sense to let kid keep working on academics. Younger has karate 2 hrs/day 2-3 days most weeks and will have volleyball practice 2 evenings a week most of the summer. There's one jiu jitsu competition on the calendar so there will probably be some extra practice for that. Violin lessons will continue most weeks so there should be some practice. I'll start counting hours towards high school PE and fine arts credits - kid will be doing extra conditioning to prepare for a karate blackbelt test in the fall so we may do some bike rides together to get in some extra cardio that isn't hard on my not-a teenager joints. 🙂 This kid will also be a crew leader at VBS one week. Sleepovers and fun with friends are priorities, so kid has already done work converting the playroom into more of a teen space. We will likely do a couple of day trips to a water park that is a little over an hour away - there are closer ones, but this one is small and only $15 per person so I'm happy to go and take a friend a few times. There may be some stuff with the youth group at church - we're getting a new director so the schedule is still not out. Between morning karate, evening volleyball, and weekend baseball, we aren't traveling much. We have a family trip to the beach but otherwise we'll mostly spend the summer hitting and throwing things. 🙂 At one time I would have hated the thought of being so tied down with sports, but somewhere along the line I came to love it as much as the kids do and I'm cherishing these years of getting to enjoy it with them.

I'll admit that I never wrote long research papers for humanities classes when I was in college. I AP'ed out of freshman comp and took 2 lit classes that required essays and papers but no long 10 page research papers. Like many biology students, I took as much psychology as possible to fulfill social science/humanities requirements because classes like developmental psych are biology-adjacent. But, I wrote a lot. We had a group major research paper in a biochem class (we all researched different hypotheses about the biochemical causes of schizophrenia and then had to work them into a single long paper). I wrote lab reports, most 3ish pages but some 10-15 pages long, frequently. Then I went on to grad school. I wrote 3 published papers and a dissertation. Had I desired, I could have filled my humanities/social science requirement and electives with lit or philosophy classes that involved more writing but I chose psychology and various music classes (marching and symphonic band) because I enjoyed them. But, the ability to analyze and write clearly and concisely was still something that I used every week. Even for test-based classes, I often needed to analyze and quickly be able to dash off a compare/contrast or explain how/why. It's always seemed to me that, while literature can be enjoyable and stretching on it's own, part of why we teach kids to write about lit is because we can teach them something and then teach them to write about what they know. The goal of that isn't necessarily for them to write about literature, but to be abe to write about whatever interests them - lit, science, politics, history, philosophy, or any other subject. My sibling works in college athletics and says that one of the most useful skills is being able to read a stat page and quickly convert it into a recap article. It's another case of using good writing combined with expertise in another field.

That looks great! There's enough variety that a picky eater can eat something bland (just rice), eat something that is familiar (egg roll, chicken fried rice) or have a choice of meats, fruit, or veggie. People can be picky in unexpected ways, but this seems like it would accommodate most tastes - there are even noodles with the pork if somebody doesn't want rice.

Urgent cares vary a lot. Where I grew up, the urgent care was just a few rooms - no specialized equipment. You could get sports physicals, routine bloodwork, minor infection (strep, etc), sprains, a few stitches. The one near my current location can do X-rays (they have to send them out digitally to be read). Both will do follow-up visits if needed. The small one from my high school years was basically my primary care doctor - when I got mono the had me come in several times until my spleen was back to normal size. When spouse had an infection a few years ago that caused some odd lab work, the one near us had him come back for a follow-up to make sure that it had cleared. They are often open until 9-10pm so they are where you can go after hours, or if you don't have a primary doctor. There are also pediatric urgent care clinics that just deal with kids illnesses that hit after-hours. When my kid were little, I took one for strep that kicked in around bedtime and the other for a fall that could have, but didn't, require stitches. They are usually a combination of appointment and working people in on a first-come, first-served basis. They are great for when you know you need a prescription (strep, pinkeye) and want to be seen quickly. We also have minute clinics in some pharmacies, where a nurse can treat routine illnesses or do things like give a flu or tetanus shot. These are also by appointment, usually same-day although things got wonky during covid when people needed tests and there were waits. You can go to an emergency room for these things, too, but it's very expensive and you may wait a very long time because they are dealing with emergencies as they come in. There it's a triage system. These are attached to hospitals, and you may be seen and sent home or you may be admitted if it's bad. Broken bones usually end up here, as do dislocations, heart attacks, car wrecks, strokes, appendicitis, etc. This is where an ambulance will take you. Locally we also have a walk-in orthopedic clinic where people with injuries can go without appointments. It's a part of the orthopedic doctor's office, and they have certain hours during the day and also on weekends when youth sports are happening.. I would expect to know about my parent's going to the ER and would be concerned. If they went to the urgent care with strep, or the orthopedic clinic with a sprain, they'd tell me but it wouldn't be time-sensitive or especially worrying.

The OP is gone but from the excerpt that I can see in Lori's post...she has a lot of good suggestions. There's also nothing terrible about using a preschool if that would be a better fit. I've homeschooled my kids from K until now (I'll have a 9th and a 12th grader next year), but both went to 1/2 day, 2-3 day/week preschool. Locally there are church preschools like this and also mother's day out programs that are less structured. I looked for something that wasn't particularly academic - letter of the week and singing and circle time were done, but mostly it involved a lot of supervised play and time outside.

@busymama7and @Not_a_Number, for one of my kids I could do this from the time that they were toddlers. Kid eats when hungry and rarely overeats. This kid will turn down dessert after a meal unless it's something that kid particularly likes. If kid eats a lot of a sweet, it's because kid is hungry and needs the calories. My other definitely has a sweet tooth. I always had this kid ask before having candy, but wasn't terribly restrictive about allowing some to be eaten. Sometime around age 10-12, kid started learning moderation and didn't ask as often. Now that both kids are high school age, I don't monitor it at all. From what I can tell, both kids will often have a small amount of somehting. Older has a jar of swedish fish-style gummies and will sometimes eat 1-2. Younger does like homemade baked goods or ice cream or popsicles, but doesn't seem to eat more than a serving at a time. So many of us went nuts when we lived independently for the first time - the freshman 15 was definitely a thing - so I was hoping that they'd learn to manage it before they left home.

I had one like this, too. That's the kid who slept well at night. But, during the day, it was exhausting. I narrated my day from the time I got up until kid went to bed. I pointed out things, read books...once kid could sit, kid sat on the counter in the kitchen while I cooked so that kid could see. But, as an infant, I read books with big colorful pictures over and over and over. We walked with the stroller. Even when kid was just 2 weeks old I had to move to a new room every so often for a change of scenery. Basically kid was unhappy until they figured out (and had the dexterity to work) puzzles at 3 and reading at 4. Otherwise, it was continuous engagement from an adult. I remember kid interacting with me and the world in ways that 'kid wasn't old enough to do' yet. It was crazy.

I'm actually wondering if part of the issue is that they are spending most of their day with somebody trying to get back to sleep. My kids (not twins) didn't sleep anywhere near that much. One was a great nighttime sleeper, but that baby slept from 9-6 at that age (nursing 1-2 times) and then was up a lot during the day. My other was a napper who slept less at night. But, both were routinely up for an hour or more at a time from an early age. Depending on which kid it was, they would bat at things hanging above their head, lay propped up on a boppy while we talked to them (I have funny memories of my toddler trying to teach the baby colors using plastic Easter eggs when baby was 2 months old), or read board books (one kid would listen to me read multiple books in a row from the time they were tiny...they liked to be talked to and it gave me something to say, and they liked bright colors). One of my friends used to say that the hard thing about babies was that by the time you figured out a routine, you needed a new one, and I know that some of my hardest times were when I was trying to keep them in a routine that they were ready to leave behind. For instance, mine gave up morning naps at 9 months and gave up naps altogether at 2-2.5. With both, we had to adjust the entire day's routines so that feeding and sleeping lined up correctly. Is it possible that, instead of spending a lot of time trying to get them to sleep, they would do better with more active time? I know that it's a tough balance because overtired kids also don't sleep. But, i remember some frustrating times when I'd try to get a kid to sleep and finally give in and decide to quit trying, only to find that the reason that they weren't sleeping is that I was trying to get them to sleep too often or at the wrong time or incorrectly positioned around mealtime. For instance, the standard 'sleep-play-eat-sleep' routine did not work for either kid. They woke up ravenous, ate, and then needed to be upright for a while to avoid reflux. If they dozed then, it might be a brief food coma nap and then they might wake up and be alert for a while, or they might cluster feed, sleep a long time, wake up hungry, and then be awake for hours. This could be way off base, but I thought I'd mention it because it was so often an issue for me. Edited because I missed the part about waking them up...I don't understand waking them after 2 hours. On the occasion that mine wanted to sleep, I let them. I might wake them from an afternoon nap when they got older so that they could sleep and eat, play, and go to bed at a reasonable time. But, if they took a long morning nap and didn't sleep much in the afternoon, so be it. There is no way that my kids would have done many short 'sleep-eat-play' cycles each day. They did as newborns, but after a few months they had longer cycles. And, honestly, I think I might rather have a baby with an unusual schedule than fight their cycles all day. My long napper definitely had shorter nights, but it was still 6 hours long, so I could sleep then and would have slept through a 2+ hour nap during the day except that I had a toddler who was awake. I've often said that one benefit to the fact that my husband was frequently out of town when we had littles is that I could keep whatever shedule made sense. I had stretches where I did laundry at night because that's when we were awake, or I might soak in the tub at 6 am because it wasn't worth going back to bed for 30 minutes between when the baby went back to sleep and when the toddler would be getting up. I did occasionally have to wake them to do something, and it generally messed them up for the rest of the day. If I had to go somewhere, I'd usually try to wake them just enough to get them to the car and hope that they went back to sleep. Usually when I'd wake them, they'd be tired, not eat well, fall back asleep or be cranky during awake time, etc.

Sometimes we have meals that don't represent the food groups - we may order pizza to pick up on the way home from a ball game, for example. But, when I cook, most meals have some sort of meat/fish as protein (although sometimes we use beans or eggs instead), some veggies or fruit or both, and a carb. In my experience, the percentages of each that you need change over the course of your life. Spouse and I should probably forego the carb portion most of the time, and I try to go light on it even though it is often my favorite part of the meal. Once the kids are out of the house, I'm guessing that our meals are more likely to be salad or sauteed/roasted veggies topped with lean protein, but right now meals are often 'bowls', with a base of rice or potato topped with meat and veggies. My kids were always active and now as teens participate in sports. One has a very high metabolism. I mostly don't worry about how much of what either of them eats. Sometimes I tell high metabolism kid to eat something with calories, since this kid particularly loves fruit and veggies which don't have enough calories. After taking a hiatus for a while, kid recently started drinking milk with meals because it helps kid to stay full. My other child is a carb-lover, so we spent years encouraging a more protein/veggie intake. At this point, it's mostly reasonable so I just offer good options. We also eat seasonally, and once the garden gets going we have fresh squash, green beans, peas, cucumbers, and/or tomatoes every day. It's funny - whenever candy comes into the house, I give the kids a week where nobody else touches their stuff. After that, I dump what is uneaten (usually most of it) into a punch bowl in the dining room. Anybody can get something whenever, within reason. They rarely do. I have to dump the bowl once or twice a year to clean out old candy. There are still chocolate Easter bunnies and chicks in there. Whenever their friends come over, they swarm the bowl and ask what they can have. In our case, having few limits has led to it being no big deal and easy to turn down. I did do some monitoring when they were small, but wasn't nearly as strict as a lot of parents in our circles. I would have a different pollicy if needed, but so far it's turned out fine. I'm not opposed to some sweets for active people, but am happier when it's less processed. Younger made homemade ice cream earlier this week because there were fresh local strawberries at the store. I get/make fruit juice or yogurt popsicles or homemade pudding pops in the summer, so there are sweets that are largely fruit/dairy based.