The only candy you can't sneak is Pop Rocks

This is a guest post by the hilarious Camille Atebe!

I love my kids. Really, I do. But their candy eating policies are complete bullshit.

You see, my kids are hoarders. Cherishers. Lingerers. They get a bag of candy and they ration themselves like total lunatics.

“Eat your candy,” I tell them, eyeing their stash greedily. You see, I've eaten all of mine already, plus gobbled down the mom tax that they gave up all too easily.

“No, that's okay. I'll save it for later.” Who are these creatures, I wonder. What foreign, sugar-averse womb did they crawl from, because surely it wasn't mine.

Then they put their bags of precious sugary gold aside, and walk away.

I wait. I swear I do. I buy more candy for myself and I wait. Days go by. Weeks. Months sometimes. And I ask them, are you gonna eat that? Yes, they say. They take one small piece, close up the bag and walk away. I seethe, inwardly.

This is torture. I'm pretty sure the international courts would have something to say about it.

So, like any human, I cave.

I eat the candy.

It was clearly not wanted, the children never really intended to eat it. It may as well be eaten by someone who will truly appreciate it. And after all, I'm old. These children are young, they have their lives ahead of them, they need to stay healthy. But children have some sort of weird sixth sense, and as soon as I've eaten it, they find their sweet tooth and now remember that they have a candy stash and get all hurt and recriminating when they discover the stash gone.

So I have developed a strategy. A solid, foolproof strategy.

As soon as the stash is put away, I begin to sneak some, one piece at a time. It requires superhuman will power, but I manage it. So when I remind them, they have a bit, see that the stash has dwindled, and think that it is their doing. When they see me chewing and ask what I'm eating, I say carrots (when chomping hard candies) or figs (when chewing up gummy candies) and they go off on their way, none the wiser.

It was a great plan. It worked for a while. Then, I flew too close to the sun and got burned. I should have known, it stands to reason, but I have a degenerative brain disease called three kids and I didn't even think about the ramifications of my actions.

I reached into the candy stash (leftover Halloween candy. In MARCH). Grabbed one of my favourites- Pop Rocks. Emptied the pouch into my mouth, hid the package in the middle of the garbage, and went about my business.

Enter child. “What are you eating?”

There are a lot of things that we can successfully hide from our children, but eating their Pop Rocks isn't one of them!

Quizzical look. “Um, carrots don't make that noise.”

“Carrots. Want some?”

“Yeah they do.”

“You aren't even chewing. I can hear them popping.” Goes to check candy stash. “Mooooooom! I was saving those!”

For what!? I want to defend myself, point out the idiocy of saving candy until it's past its best before date (which, btw, is so hard to do but my kids manage it.)

But, with a mouth full of exploding strawberry flavoured sugar, it's hard to find the moral high ground. All I can do is open my mouth next to the kid's ear and drive them away with disgust. Then console myself with some gummy worms and start chopping carrots for my weird and wonderful spawn.