I don’t hate Halloween, but I can’t say I’ve been looking forward to it.
We tried to get the pumpkin patch this year. The Saturday we’d set aside to do it, Benny got sick. That 2-3 day fever thing that was going around. We’d made plans to go with some friends of ours, and their little girl had the same thing just a week earlier. We rescheduled for the following Saturday but that was the day after all the rain we (finally) got and we didn’t want to deal with all the mud. So this year we have no pumpkins.
We have lots of fake pumpkins. A few years ago Target had light up pumpkins that just looked cool to me, so I bought a bunch. We have about six purple, green and orange fake, light up pumpkins. We also have a huge inflatable witch in our front yard. Not my idea. Three years ago my brother-in-law David was staying with us for a while. He and Slade went out the day of Halloween and found this witch on sale. It looks ridiculous but the kids like it. Actually, Benny likes it when he’s inside the house. He doesn’t like walking past it – he covers his eyes and says he’s hiding from the witch. I tried to tell him she’s just a balloon – he told me to make her fly away into the sky like he’s seen his balloons from Harris Teeter do. Smart kid.
So what do you do with a diabetic kid on Halloween? We were just at Benny’s pediatric endocrinologist – had a great checkup by the way, great A1c number, hooray! On the way out, they gave us a huge list of popular Halloween candy with the carb count for each item. There was even a cute picture of a vampire saying, "I vant your blood" and holding a blood glucose meter. Nice to have a doctor’s office with a sense of humor!
Benny can absolutely have a little bit of Halloween candy, but he can’t have as much as we’ve let Lea dig into in years past and we can’t have it sitting around the house for days and days. I’ve got a plan, but I’m not sure how well it’ll work. I told Benny last night that Halloween is a holiday where you run around the neighborhood and collect candy from friends. Then you eat a little bit of candy that night and trade the rest for toys. He thought that sounded great.
Lea isn’t quite so sure, so for her, I’ve sweetened the pot. I’ve told her she can keep five days worth of candy, two pieces a day. She’s can hand over the rest for toy money. I’ll give her a quarter for each piece of candy and we’ll go to the toy store over the weekend. She immediately asked, "A quarter for each package of candy or each piece of candy?" Gotta love the way that kid’s mind works, but I am not forking over $.25 for every last M&M! I should have made it a dime. She’s going to get so much candy for so much cash that she’ll probably wind up with a real Barbie car.
My guess is that tonight Lea will go out with her friends (and her dad) and go to as many homes as they can as fast as they can. We live in a huge neighborhood and I bet she’ll come home with more than 100 packages of candy. Benny, on the other hand, will probably make it to about 4 homes before he starts freaking out at the costumes and being out in the dark. He’ll be my giving-out-candy buddy at home.
Tomorrow I’ll let you know how it all went. I’ll post candy amounts, dollar amounts and blood sugar numbers! No bets on which will be highest.