November 1, 2006

"I Got A Rock!" Or, Not Quite Getting The Halloween Concept

charlie_brown_rock.jpgI wasn't there [work], but the kid and the wife went to the 'burbs, Grandma's neighborhood, to do a bit of trick-or-treating last night. It was the first time. [Call us sticks in the mud, but we didn't dress her up as anything when she was 6 or 18 months; it felt kind of funny, and since we didn't have Halloween parties we needed to take her to, it would have been purely for our amusement. And the pictures.]

If you think about it, if you're a little kid living in a nearly candy-free world, Halloween is supremely weird. You dress up in some kind of costume, then you roam around, knocking on doors asking total strangers for things. And they present you with massive bowls of candy.

Though she eventually warmed to the idea, the kid just was not getting it:

  • Before she left the house, she filled her little pumpkin bucket up with treats, like her stuffed dog, the mallet to her xylophone, a little burp blanket, and--no kidding--a rock.
  • At the second door, with her second giant bowl of candy shoved in her face, the kid turned to my wife and whispered, "But I already got a treat."
  • Then tonight, to head off any problems with the "one piece per day" rule, my wife offered the kid a bite of her Snickers [i.e., one of the 25 pieces we raided from the kid under the guise of "checking for razor blades"; having your kid score you candy is AWESOME.] "You can have a bite. It has peanuts in it, but you'll like it." The kid took a bite, then asked to spit it out--A SNICKERS--because of the peanuts.

    So if anyone has tips on how to deprogram an embarassingly over-conditioned peanut-phobe, please don't be shy. Because we obviously went way overboard on the whole "no peanuts till you're older" thing.

  • 2 Comments

    Can't help ya - our daughter has a peanut allergy, and we've got it drilled into her that peanuts will make her sick.

    This was pretty much our daughter's first exposure to candy, as well, aside from a few small nibbles of chocolate.

    Totally for the pictures...that, and finding the most rediculous lobster costume on clearance 2 days prior, is why we dressed up our 9 month old. Now we can torment her in about 16 years with jokes about melted butter and how yummy she was as a baby.

    We did not, however trick or treat with her. I think that's just wrong because everyone knows you are really doing it because YOU want the candy. But when she's bigger? Yeah, there's going to be a LOT of "razor blades" in her bag of treats.

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