The Candyman Can

I had a music box that played that song when I was a kid. And I luuuuved it almost as much as I luuuuved candy. Since the poor kid is allergic to food coloring, Phoenix's candy experiments have been more limited than he'd prefer. It also sadly curbs his innate addiction to peppermint (even our homemade play doh is scented with peppermint oil). After insisting the last blasted after-dinner-mint would "be fine, fine, fine, mama" but regretting it the next day, we decided to find some alternatives. We located a lovely online company with natural candies galore and P happily picked a few treats to try. The spearmints were a flop. The heart shaped lolly was a hit, aesthetically, but only deserved a few licks. The peppermints though... wow. It was a pretty large bag and he dedicated himself to finding its bottom.

True Consensual Living with a 3 year old is often challenging, but the dining table has never been a battleground for our beliefs (well, excluding the dancing on the table, naked, during dinner bit, which we hardly notice anymore, but definitely took some redefining of dinnertime expectations to get used to :) ). Ever since he outgrew his many food allergies (only 2 left!) P's always rounded out his diet, naturally and autonomously. His peppermint ice cream binges are followed by days of hard boiled eggs, chickpeas, kiwis, cantaloupe and cooked carrots. I know this to be true and the child is, well, Growing. But each new bag of Booty brings on the same binges for us both. Skip lunch, eat Pirate's Booty. Mom internally freaks. P then resumes normal eating habits and I remember why its so important for him to listen to his own body rather than my mouth. But for some reason, maybe because we were both sick, this candy binge seemed more ominous than the occasional handful of cookies. As he sniffled and looked pathetic he popped peppermint after peppermint into his sweet little mouth. This continued all day and into the next until the bag was gone. It was the first time since his allergies left him that I've actually considered stepping in to limit a food (selfish exception: chocolate bars at bedtime!), but I couldn't find any more peace with the message this would give him than with his peppermint intake. I held my tongue trying to remember to trust P and his process of learning. As the peppermints dwindled he was hardly even sucking them, just for a couple of seconds, and then spitting them onto a plate. It was like he was driven to get through them all, but didn't want to actually Eat them all. And when they were finished, he was back to his beans, telling me how much fun the peppermints were. I'm hoping I finally learned this lesson and next month's Booty bag will be just a blip on my mommy radar.