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Strollerderby
Waiting until dark is not the best choice.
One of the most fun fall holidays falls on a dreary Monday this year. For the past two years, moms, dads, and kids have been able to enjoy Halloween on a weekend, but for the next four yeas or so, we’ll all find ourselves trick-or-treating on a school night. Or school afternoon at the very least.
Weekday Halloween celebrations just aren’t typically as much fun as rummaging the streets, collecting loads of sugar-laden candy, knowing you’ll have the day off to enjoy (or recover). The dilemma with weekday trick-or-treating is that no one ever really knows what time to go. Continue reading »
All Halloween candy is not created equal
When I was a kid, there was no such thing as peanut allergies. Everyone consumed gluten (particularly since no one knew what it was) and “vegan” wasn’t in any dictionary. Eating meat was something all people did (unless you were a relic from the ’60s, in which case we didn’t know you existed anyway because you lived far away on some kind of a commune, or in Oregon).
Which is why Halloween was that much better back then. No one had to tiptoe around special dietary needs. Sugar wasn’t the enemy. In fact, it was every kid’s best friend. Particularly when it was served in straws (hello, Pixy Stix!).
Take a stroll down memory lane and revisit the candy that made Halloweens of yore so much better than it is today (and also be reminded of some of the “treats” that kids dreaded having dropped into their plastic jack-o’-lanterns):
Candy spooks parents at Halloween, and all year long.
While kids shiver to scary tales of ghosts and goblins on Halloween, parents are shuddering at an all-too real horror: the giant bags of candy that will soon invade their houses.
Is candy evil, or just misunderstood? That’s the question posed by the Candy Professor in her blog on the history of sugary sweets in America.
As the New York Times puts it:
“The big idea behind Candy Professor is that candy carries so much moral and ethical baggage that people view it as fundamentally different — in a bad way — from other kinds of food.”
I kind of love this. Is candy that different from, say, juice or cookies? Not from a nutritional standpoint. But culturally it’s a world of difference. There’s something indulgent about candy. It’s the vice of childhood, gradually replaced as we age by cocktails.
Eat up, it's good for you!
For most of us, Halloween is all about the candy. While we may try to eat healthy the rest of the year, this holiday provides us with the perfect opportunity to indulge our sweet tooth with wild abandon. But along with all that wild abandon can come some guilt. After all, candy is bad for you, right?
Wrong!
According to Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D., a health psychologist at Stanford University, there are actually some health benefits to eating candy. In fact, some of your favorite treats have what she calls “candy superpowers,” possessing the ability ability to leap mounds of guilt in a single bound. So, grab a handful of your favorite sweet treat and enjoy! Continue reading »
Permission to eat sweets
My two-and-a-half year old son is already sizing up bags of candy in the aisles at the grocery store, telling me we should probably buy them to stock up. And he’s rehearsing in his little mind how he’s going to trick-or-treat. At the end of Sunday night’s Halloween festivities, we will no doubt have a mountain of sweets in our house.
In the run-up to Halloween, it’s apropos to say that — contrary to popular belief –sugar does not get your little one wound-up.
Over 20 double-blind placebo controlled studies have been done on the question of sweets and their effect on behavior and hyperactivity. It’s been shown across all this research, that there is no difference between kids’ behavior when they’ve had a dose of sugar and when they’ve had none.
So why do we think sweets make for hyperactivity? Continue reading »
Rainsets recalled for peanut allergy contamination
Just in time for Halloween, Raisinets are being recalled for peanut contamination. A surprise peanut in a bag of chocolate-covered raisins would be a terrible trick for a peanut-allergic trick-or-treater.
The Raisinets being recalled are 10 oz. “fun size” packages sold at Target, Don Quixote, and Shop Rite. Here’s what to do about the recall:
Recently a commenter asserted that raising a child is identical to raising a dog. “Both can be encouraged to good behavior through rewards and discouraged from bad behavior through punishment.” “Both demand enthusiastic praise and consistant (sic) (non-angry) discipline.” “Just like a dog, you must put a plastic cone on a child’s head to keep them from chewing on their butt.” Okay, I made that last one up. Or did I?
Many took umbrage with the commenter’s remarks, but I (always the scientist) decided to put them to the test. Over a weekend I pitted my three-year-old against our 1 ½ year old border collie to once and for all resolve the question: who is smarter, a toddler or a dog? Here are the competitors.
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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