As a starting point, I would take my own low(er) calorie sweet treats and have that instead of what everyone else is eating. I realised that the only time I really binge on junk food is when I have insomnia. I get hungry, and no one is watching and I don't want to make a noise, so it's easier to get a handful of biscuits and some chocolate. Once I started keeping canned fruit in the fridge - something I enjoy (although admittedly not nearly as much as the biscuits and choc) and that was quick and easy to serve I found it pretty easy to skip the 2am binge.

It sounds to me like you don't have an actual budget? Some years ago dh received a large salary increase, and 1 year later it occurred to me to ask myself where that extra money was. Uhhhh? We could account for only a fraction of it in specific assets or experiences. That's when I started categorising money properly. Now, when the monthly payment for dd's orthodontics ends, that money will be recategorised - some portion of the monthly amount might go into the miscellaneous fund which is ours to spend. Some might go to saving for next kid's braces. Or into the holiday fund. Wherever it goes, there will be a plan. As for the guilt thing: I truly believe that saying no to kids over financial things is the greatest gifts I can give them. Wants and needs are not the same thing. All our wants do not have to be met. We need to learn to identify that feeling of discomfort we get when wants aren't met and realise that we don't have to act on it. Everything we choose represents an opportunity cost - and there's no such thing as a free lunch. These concepts form an ongoing conversation with the kids. (I'll add that the salary increase decreased as the economy tightened but we'd made dramatic headway in our mortgage by then and had not 'acclimatised' to a lifestyle we could no longer sustain.)

The only time we've ever had to deal with this I did talk to the teacher. I simply told her what I was hearing from dd, giving specific examples, and made it clear that I understood there could be two sides to every story (maybe dd was being too sensitive?) and asked her to watch for problems. MG had left the activity within a few weeks - it's no fun for MGs when the teacher intervenes every tlme they try something...

At that age my ds listened mostly to songs. He LOVED listening though. It probably started at 18 months where I used my mobile phone with music on to distract him on car trips. By two years he had a little MP3 player just the right size for tiny hands, purchased because we were due to take a long international flight. He liked holding it and pressing buttons. We mostly had music and audio stories from a website called StoryNory - not sure if that even exists anymore - and recordings of books that he was familiar with from us reading them to him (like the Cars book which came with an audio CD).

Take the meds. Honestly, you're describing me when I was depressed. I just couldn't get perspective, anything went wrong I'd be furious for days, I woke up each day dreading the thought of facing it. I took meds for 6 months (in retrospect a little longer would have been better). It's 10 years later and I've never needed them again and never regretted taking them.

Hmm... Ikea is your friend if you like frugal. Unless you're dead set against mass produced stuff... I don't do ornaments, although we do have a few sentimental pieces which I keep high enough so that no one can see the dust! Stretching fabric over a frame can make a good wall decoration. I often use fabric as a starting point for what colours will go together, as I have no natural sense of these things. Ana White has really easy to follow plans for building furniture and other odds and ends such as picture rails or shoe racks - worth looking at if you're on a budget and up for a challenge (I taught myself to use power tools and build stuff as a gift to myself when I turned 40). Mirrors - I like mirrors for giving a sense of space and depth to a room (plus we use the large mirror in the dining room as a notice board using liquid chalk pens). I don't think that directly answers any of your questions, but maybe gives you some new ideas.

No. That said, when we lived through a severe flood (1.5m in our yard which had a septic tank, 30cm in our house) it didn't even occur to me to wear boots or disinfect: we scraped out the mud, washed everything down and moved on. No one got sick. I probably wouldn't roll around in or drink the flood water, though!

Over my two piece swimsuit (ie a long tankini top).

I'm 44 and within 6kg of my 'pre-baby' body weight, currently 64kg. I've never been more than 10 kg (22lbs) over the pre-baby "ideal" (which was 58kg and unlikely to be seen again!) As a family we generally make good food choices and have improved these over time: we don't (usually) drink sugary drinks, eat deep fried food, eat dessert or eat much meat. We eat small portions, usually skip cakes or pastries if we head out for coffee, don't generally snack between meals, have a nightly treat of one or two squares of chocolate (but seldom eat chocolate apart from that), and have upped our vegetable consumption and reduced bread, rice and pasta over time. Dh is very good about exercise, but likes to have treats like a drink or extra chocolates when he wants to. I do a lot less exercise, but am ok with limiting myself on treats. Both our approaches work. I try to walk at least twice a week for 45 minutes with various friends, and we have been trying to walk on the beach with the kids once on the weekend. And, for the first time ever, I've recently added a twice week exercise class. All this has definitely been a progression for us: as we've grown older we've grown a little wiser, but we've also had to consciously improve how we eat in order to maintain the same weight. There's no doubt we're seeing our metabolism slow as we age! At the moment I'm trying to get my weight a little lower, and yes, it's difficult without adding regular exercise and cutting food intake to 1200 cal per day.

Thanks! I want a really small single sofa bed but the only ones I find don't look too comfortable. A mattress pad would help a lot. I'll have another look at it.

Where do you store it, though? Does it need go be stored separately from the sofa, or does it fold up in the sofa? We don't have extra storage space.

Dh read through some of it with ds when he was 8 yrs. Now it's on the shelf and I'll remind him to look at it if he wants to.

If your kids have an iPod you can set up an iCloud email address. Otherwise a Gmail account. I don't get much spam on any of my email accounts, and haven't noticed any on my gmail accounts - it depended where you're using your email address. Once or twice a year I'll get a patch of spam emails on my main account - I think it's after I have used my email to register on a less reliable site.

Yes. My friend and her two young sons travelled quite a long distance twice a week to be able to exercise her dogs. (Dogs moved from South Africa to Australia - I think it was a 6 month quarantine and that some of it was competed in South Africa although I might be wrong about that.)

I'm with you! Never worn culottes but I don't think they look terrible on the models. And the top short shorts... Nooooo!

Dd15 is making chicken laksa soup for which I am hugely grateful as I've just finished one of those grocery shopping trips that never seemed to end and I really don't want to look at food (although I'm happy to eat it!).

That's what I always tell dd when she worries about this sort of stuff: try to think of one awful thing someone (unintentionally) said to you, or something terribly embarrassing that someone else did. I never can. Perhaps an embarrassing incident in which case I recall it with sympathy, never laughter, but usually I don't even come up with that. So either we're the ONLY thoughtless silly people in the world or (more likely) other people don't remember our awful moments either - they're too busy with their own. (As I write this I do remember one moment of someone else's which I do laugh about when I recall it, although with great sympathy: dh was working on a project to install cell phone towers in the early days. He had a visiting engineer from overseas with him, and they went onto the roof of a building with a water tank of some sort. Dh stepped carefully on the tank cover, walking around so he was placing his weight on the rim. The visitor saw him on it and stepped into the centre, and went straight through the cover into the tank. Dh felt terrible, although it wasn't his fault. The poor guy (and the stuff he had in a backpack) was soaked through.

I work really hard not to dwell on things that can't be undone. If I start to think of them I put them in a box and close the lid, metaphorically speaking. Thinking of that image helps, along with some '4 count breathing' to deal with the stress memories like that invoke. We'd been living overseas for few years when I was visiting home and attended a birthday party for a relative's son. Making small talk with one of the fathers there I asked "Who do you belong to", gesturing at the kids. He seemed taken aback and said he wasn't there with anyone which seemed ... odd. Later I realised his wife had been part of my relative's baby group with her son. The wife had killed her baby and herself when suffering from post partum depression. I don't really feel bad about that one as I really had no way to know. But I do feel so sad that I may have caused pain for the poor man.

Someone who feeds emotionally on someone else's misfortune.

I wouldn't, not with the pond. I guess I'd consider 16 as 'adult' for supervisory purposes. I was at a homeschool park outing where an older sibling was supposed to watch the younger sibling. Next thing we know the mom was hauling the toddler out of the lake - he could still just stand but was grappling for footing on the slippery bottom. Kids get distracted.

That sounds great - I love snack dinners.

I did the fruit and veg shop while hungry last Sunday so getting the 4 of us to eat our way through 4 bags of fresh stuff has taken most of my attention this week. Today I used leftover coconut milk, the last of the frozen veg, the last of the peanuts and some cauliflower and cabbage leftover from a stirfry earlier this week to make coconut fried rice. Usually we use a nasi goreng spice for our fried rice so this made a change. Very tasty! I have a zucchini and some tomatoes in the fridge, and a sweet potato in the cupboard so I'm thinking about some sort of frittata tomorrow. I also used a soon to expire pizza discount voucher for dinner last night - that should count, right?

Depends on what you mean by 'really gross'. If we're talking potty-training accident gross or meat juice gross I'd probably use toilet paper for the worst of it, then rags and then they'd go into the wash. We also use rags for cleaning and I'm really not fussed - they go in with whatever else is being washed on a cold wash and they aren't bleached. We're pretty much the healthiest family I know, so I don't think it's done any harm!

Something by Alexander McCall Smith? He has a few different series. The Ladies' Detective Agency would technically be mystery/ crime, I suppose, but the emphasis is on folksie wisdom and humour.

We found that it did not actually work out to that great a deal because there were hidden costs - something like sit through the sales pitch and you get a free holiday - apart from the $100 a day cleaning charge, or whatever. (Made up figures, this was many years ago.) I don't like being manipulated or lied to so we passed on the "free" holiday on principle.