since Karen brought it up I decided I’ll put in my two cents worth.  So much of what she says is true.  I went through everything she did, from buying “good” candy to buying “wouldn’t eat that if I were starving” candy.  Hiding it.  Giving it away.  I wrote here and  here about my struggles last year with tootsie rolls.  Mac loves giving out candy on Halloween so we aren’t going down the “no candy here” route.

I did decide to do something different this year.  Normally I buy those huge packs which only contained one thing I liked … the dreaded tootsie rolls.  The good thing about this is that 90% of the candy was stuff I didn’t eat.  The bad, of course, was that I would take out every.single.tootsie.roll and save it for me to eat.  The other bad thing about those huge bags of candy is that there is usually stuff left over and it is WAY too easy to grab one little piece of candy and think that it is okay because it is just one little piece of candy.  Of course in my world that one little piece of candy ALWAYS leads to another and another and another until I’m stuffing them into my mouth so fast that I don’t even have time to eat one piece before another is shoved in.

So this year I bought full-size candy bars of a type I don’t normally eat.  (I had to put a qualifying adverb in there because when it comes to Halloween candy we all know that all bets are OFF.)  My thinking on getting the full size bars is that first of all I know exactly how many I bought.  So no kidding lying to myself about how many I’ve eaten.  Secondly it takes a lot more justification on my part to eat a full-size bar rather than an itsy, bitsy, so-small-it-shouldn’t-even-count piece of candy.  Thirdly Mac is ALWAYS concerned that we won’t have enough candy.  So he buys more and more.  And then gives out huge handfuls to each kid leading to it looking like we ARE going to run out of candy (horror of horrors!) so that he writes himself a note to make sure he buys even more candy the following year.

I also stockpiled McDonald’s toys this year (none of my gks like the toys but they all like the meals so I keep the toys) and will give those out to any littlies who not only don’t need a big a candy bar but don’t need candy at all.

And finally we will know EXACTLY how many trick-or-treaters show up.  (See above note about Mac writing himself a note … when you are both engineer-types you tend to be a little lot geeky about numbers.)