Candy! Candy! Candy!

Holy cow. I don't know what else to say. Holy cow. The kids were bigger and more mobile this year as I mentioned in my Halloween post. This meant that we were able to cover more ground than in Halloween's past. As a direct mathematical result, they were able to collect more candy. So much in fact that the two smaller kids were having trouble carrying their plastic pumpkin buckets by the end. It was a lot of candy. I just took a moment to weigh it. We have 12 pounds of candy. Holy cow.

Loot!

It must take us a long time to finish that much candy, right? After Thanksgiving? All the way to Christmas? Nope, one week. Our Halloween candy will be gone in a week, and none of the kids will develop major blood sugar issues in that time. You see, we don't eat a lot of sweets. We have dessert after dinner 3-5 days a week, but other than that, we just don't have sweets. We don't even have them in the house usually. My 3 year old doesn't really even like sweet things most of the time. More than once he's started into a piece of cake only to say that it's too sweet and he doesn't like it. We're weird, but we have a plan. The idea is, that of all the things in the world to eat, sugar is pretty much at the bottom of the list. The hope is to instill long term habits in our kids about food. Veggies, fruits, meats, dairy, whole grain stuff, then last, refined grains and sugar. Our kids will almost certainly call this some sort of communist brainwashing someday. Trying to program them with healthy habits against their will. It's some sort of evil programing. I'm ok with that.
So what do we do with 12 pounds of candy in a week? They get to pick one piece of candy each night for dessert. Four kids, 8 nights (one week, plus Halloween night) that's 32 pieces of candy plus whatever Daddy and Mommy filch after bedtime which isn't that much. Really. If you look at the picture, they have WAY more than 32 pieces of candy in that pile. You can't just throw away candy. It would cause much weeping. That would be mean and cruel. Much more mean and cruel than I can possibly be, so we pass it on.
My sister lives in Wisconsin and runs The Naked Elm , a bakery outside Madison. If you're in the neighborhood you should go buy bread/bagels/pizza from her. For the last 6 years or so she has been the recipient, often unwilling, of our leftover Halloween candy. We box it up and ship it off and the kids are happy knowing that they've shared their Halloween loot with Aunt Biggie. In the beginning she didn't have any kids so we convinced our kids that with no kids, she didn't get any candy, so sharing with her was really nice. Now she has a two year old, so technically she should have her own source of Halloween candy, but nobody had brought this up yet. Well no one but Biggie that is. She has mentioned that disposing of 5-10 pounds of candy isn't actually as easy at it sounds, especially because all of the good chocolate has been picked out by the time we mail it. Sorry. My kids are actually excited to send the candy on to Aunt Biggie. They keep talking about the other stuff they can put in the box to send to their cousin. Someday they'll figure out that it isn't completely normal to send candy half way across the country. That will be a complicated day for me.
In the name of complete honesty, I need to admit that the first 3 years or so of Halloween we were totally against giving our kids any of the candy. After we put them to bed we would replace the candy with bags of goldfish and pretzels and fruit snacks. They never noticed that their candy had changed form during the night, and after a week everything was gone. With very small kids, we were only able to stop at 5-8 houses though so there wasn't that much candy for Mommy and Daddy to eat, so we didn't mail it to Aunt Biggie. Finally, we sort of relaxed about sugar intake and we realized that we couldn't pull off the old switcheroo without too much suspicion. They were on to us.