A Strict Candy Diet

When I was growing up, I viewed candy as a necessity.  There must always be candy!  So, being a little OCD anyway, I rationed my candy very carefully.  Each holiday provided me with just enough candy to last through till the next one.  It all started on Halloween of course (The Motherlode!), which gave me plenty of candy to make it through until Christmas came along.  I would then collect all the candy from my stocking, presents, parties, and whatnot, and ration it out through Valentine’s Day.  I would be eating candy hearts until Easter, which gave me enough jellybeans and Cadbury eggs to make it (just barely) through to the season of parades and the candy that one might collect from Memorial Day, Independence Day, and other assorted celebrations.  I will admit that I sometimes ran out of this summer supply before Halloween, but that only made October that much more exciting for me.  And I was never tempted to gorge on all of it at once, because then what would that leave me for tomorrow?

My wife’s family took the opposite approach.  They were told at Halloween that they could eat as much candy as they wanted, and when it was gone, it was gone.  I suppose, in terms of parental sanity, that this gave you only a few short days of candy-fueled psychosis, rather than having your children constantly on a sugar drip all year long.  It was with this in mind that I told my two year old son Edward that he could eat all of his Halloween candy at once.

Now, Edward, through various tricks and schemes, had gotten a fairly large haul of candy, and I don’t mind telling you that this bucket of treats that he collected is currently his most prized possession.  He talks about it constantly.  When he goes to sleep at night, he asks where his candy is.  When he wakes up in the morning, the first thing he says is, “Where mah canny?!”  If you try to keep him and his candy apart, like maybe by putting it up on the counter, he flies into a confectionary rage, demanding to be reunited with his one true love, the bucket of candy.

So I gave it to him.  I’d rather he eat it all now and be done with it, rather than having it sit around for weeks and have him always whining for it, right?  The problem was, I severely underestimated his capacity for candy consumption.  On November 1st, he poured that giant bucket of candy out onto the couch and tore into it.  I am pretty sure he ate nothing else that day, although he got nuts (Snickers), grains (Twix), fruit (Skittles), milk (chocolate), and meat (Gummi Bears), so I think overall it was a fairly balanced diet.

He ate seven or eight pieces right away, and then continued to munch on more all day long.  I’m pretty sure he didn’t eat any lunch, and by the afternoon, I finally felt that I ought to take the candy away before he exploded or turned into a Fun Size something-or-other.  He was not happy with this decision, but I stand by it.  3 pounds of candy is plenty for a two year old to eat in a 6 hour period if you ask me.

In terms of his mood, well, he did seem to be deliriously happy all day, at least while he was eating the candy, so that was good.  The real problem came at bedtime.  For some reason, he did not seem very tired, and though he had not had any actual food all day, he seemed to be filled with a boundless energy and was jumping all over the place.  I decided to give him a nice relaxing bath, which he took as an opportunity to practice his long distance splashing technique, and no matter how many stories I read him, or songs I sang to him, he was clearly not going to be closing his eyes at any time in the near future.

Here is a secret about parenting.  Your kids will be bad, and your kids will be good.  You will love them, and you will be very angry with them.  Though it doesn’t sometimes seem like it at the time, there is not much they can throw at you that you can’t eventually handle.  Except for not sleeping.  If your kids don’t sleep, you don’t sleep.  This is why new parents are always looking so confused and out of it.  This is why “kid sleeps through the night” is such a huge milestone for all parents.  It ranks right up there with potty training as the number one most awesome thing that your kid did to improve your life.  Letting you sleep.  Because if you don’t get any sleep, you cannot deal with your children, or anything else in life, effectively.  Luckily, when they are teeny babies, you don’t really have anything real to deal with.  Oh, you think you do.  You hold someone else’s life in your hands for the first time, yadda, yadda, yadda.  But honestly, babies don’t do anything.  You can be 90% zombie and still take care of them.  They are not constantly roaming your house looking for things to destroy or ways to kill themselves.  They just lay around and poop.

So the point is, when you have a two year old, you need that thing to go to sleep.  You need it to not wake up at 1 am and decide to play with cars until 5 am.  You need it not to try to wake its sister up, because she has school in the morning.  You especially do not need it to climb into your bed and jump up and down and poke you in the face repeatedly because it is bored.  No, you need it to be sleeping.  Which is why, on November 2nd, the candy stayed on the counter.  Yes, he was mad.  And yes, he still had like 10 pieces over the course of the day.  But I can tell you right now, that after my November 1st, I am never letting that kid go on a strict candy diet again.