My kids typically don’t eat sugar, but on special occasions they do eat a little. What they absolutely don’t eat is food coloring. This 4th of July we are going to the parade in our neighborhood and the kids in the floats always throw out candy. So… I made these little treats to trade for the artificial stuff. Marshmallows*, cut in half, dipped in chocolate and colored with beets, turmeric, and red cabbage. (And I poured the leftover chocolate into a Hello Kitty mold.) We never did food coloring, but now we are being strict on a whole new level because we are starting the Feingold Program.

*Not just any marshmallows, these are vetted by the Feingold program and contain only pure ingredients.

On another topic… My daughter was recently diagnosed with Amblyopia (lazy eye). The eye moves with the other eye, so you can’t specifically tell that it is “lazy”, but the vision is extremely poor in that eye. So, now she has eye glasses and she needs to wear a patch to force her “bad” eye to work. At her age there is still time to get her brain to recognize the eye, but if it goes untreated her brain could stop recognizing images from the left eye. The ophthalmologist was insistent that we  needed to use the stick on patches but Sierra had a reaction to the glue and her skin was very sore. So I looked online and found eye-glass cozies. I can sew… so Sierra and I designed one for her and made it right then and there! So much more comfortable but we need to keep an eye on her so she doesn’t “cheat and peek”.