Home Sweet Home

Did you miss me? Here I am, back in the O-hi-o. Vacation was great, but there's something so nice about finally getting home and getting to sleep in your own bed again. Home seems even sweeter when you've spent a few nights alternating between sleeping on a fold-out couch and sharing a twin bed with a leggy toddler. I don't think I slept more than two consecutive hours the entire time.

The best part about coming home is that Halloween is only a few days away, and I've been looking forward to stepping up to a very important parental responsibility - the Testing of the Halloween Candy.

The Testing of the Halloween Candy was always a big deal in our house. When I was little, the trick-or-treating rules were different. There was none of this 2-hour block from 6-8 BS. Trick-or-treating started on the way home from school at 2:45 and continued until we were too tired to take another step. We went out with our friends, then went to grandma Julie's house and hit up her neighborhood, then went to grandma Karen's house and finished up our evening on her street. Just another benefit of having the whole fam-damn-ily living in the same town.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that, as an OCD sufferer, my favorite part of Halloween came after the candy had all been collected. We would run home and dump out our overstuffed pillowcases onto the living room floor. Then the sorting and counting began. Piles of candy sorted by type and color. Milk duds over here, Reece's over there, Smarties tossed aside to be traded to the Little Sister for something better....



We counted our candy - how many Snickers did you get? How many Tootsie Rolls? And then the trading started, with each candy having a certain ratio to all other candies - three Tootsie Rolls for a Snickers, 1 Peppermint Patty for two DumDums, all the Smarties in our pile for whatever we could get from Katie.

Once the dust settled, Dad came over to survey our hauls. That's when the Candy Testing started. As kids, we knew that this was very important, for our own safety. The Milk Duds and Reece cups were the most dangerous, and thus required the largest sample size. I know it was a difficult task for him, but he performed his work admirably for the good of his children.

This year, I'm fully prepared for the task. My sources tell me that Milk Duds and Snicker bars are of top priority - they're Test-Level Orange.