Easter Candy Conundrum

The Easter Bunny made sure his candy was in the store nice and early this year. I think I bought my first bag of Cadbury Mini Eggs somewhere around Feb. 15, hours after the last of the Valentine’s Day candy was hustled out the door. Oddly, just days before Easter, you couldn’t find a bag of mini eggs in the grocery store even if you were ready to trade several packages of Peeps to get it. I guess the stores have to make room for the next holiday’s candy display, but I’m not sure what that would be. Red, white and blue themed peanut butter cups for Memorial Day or the Fourth of July?

I have been steadily buying Easter candy ever since mid February, not for me, mind you. But for ‘The Children.’ Never mind that 3-year-old Lucy shouldn’t be downing mass quantities of chocolate, if for no other reason than my own continuing sanity, or that Isaac, who will be one in a couple weeks, acts like we are trying to choke him if we put anything in his mouth requiring any sort of chewing; boyfriend has four teeth, but he doesn’t know what to do with them.

So you know that the majority of all the Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, Hershey’s Miniatures and M&Ms will wind up on my hips and thighs, just in time for the new season at the Padonia Park Club. I’ll be the mom eating the leftover jelly beans in July (there’s no way the chocolate will make it into May, even) while wearing one of those skirted bathing suits from Lands’ End, which are fashionable, yes, and provide supportive, slimming effects via their trampoline-like material. But I would be wearing something skimpier like the women my fellow male lifeguards back in the day used to call “yummy mummies” from anywhere else if I wouldn’t frighten the community.

For the most part, all my pre-purchased candy landed in my shopping cart thanks to coupons, and it has mostly been stashed in the basement out of sight and mostly out of mind ever since. But come Saturday night, I’ll be busy filling those little plastic eggs and nestling them in that plastic grass on behalf of the mythical bunny, and I know I’ll be helping myself.

I carefully purchased a few books, trinkets and toys to add to the kids’ baskets because I’m trying to be a good parent and follow Cookie Monster’s example that cookies, and candy by association, are “sometimes foods.” Lucy is getting a big book cataloging the Disney Princesses. Isaac is getting this noisy hammer which we’ll probably regret buying sometime around 10 a.m. on Easter Sunday. So I can manage to control their sweet teeth but not my own.