Candy, candy can-dy. Candy candy can-dy.

Halloween is here and Kevin is starting to look a little sick. For the last week or so he’s been gorging himself on fun sized goodies. They’re everywhere – on desks, at meetings, in lunch boxes. It’s so bad that last night, I offered him a Snickers bar and he actually said no. That’s how I know today is Halloween. ‘Cause on any other day of the year, that Snickers would be out of my hand, unwrapped, and gobbled up before I could finish saying, “do you want one?”

A few weeks ago, before Kevin had OD’d on candy, Kat and I took a little girl’s road trip up to Tacoma for a stamp convention. While we were wandering about we ran across a delicious find. Right next to our hotel was to home of Almond Roca. And even more important, next to the manufacturing plant was the outlet store. Inside we discovered the Almond Roca that didn’t make the cut. Either it was wrapped wrong, too short, too long, or not enough chocolate – flaws that we knew would be overlooked by our husbands. Being good wives, we each picked up a tub of boo-boo chocolates.

When I got home, I gave Kevin his tub-o-treats and he ran away crackling with glee. I watched as he pawed at the tub top for a few minutes. Try as he might, he just couldn’t get the lid off of the chocolates.

“Hey, is this candy child-proofed?” he wailed in despair. “Who would child-proof candy? That’s just mean!”, he declared. He looked so forlorn that I took pity on him and opened the tub. I’m thinking he might be onto something though. Putting candy in one of those awful medicine bottles where you have to have just the right hand coordination to open it might be a very good idea. If nothing else, it would slow Kevin down.

I am, however, dreading what will come once the sun goes down tonight. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a scrooge about Halloween. We are fully decorated and stocked to the brim with goodies. The problem is Artie.

You see, every time that doorbell rings, all Artie sees is a delightful bite-sized treat standing at the door. So I need one hand to open the door and one hand to give out candy and another hand or tow to keep Artie from taking a bite out of the wee little people on the doorstep. Last year, one sweet little girl saw Artie, yelled “puppy” and ran inside before either her mother or I could move. (Those little tikes sure can move fast.) Luckily, Artie was too shocked at being rushed by a kid (they are usually running the other way) to move and her mom was able to pull her back before she lost her arm. I think this year I’m going to lock the pooch in a room until the candy’s run out and the lights are turned off.

Now, I have to go find my costume for tonight. I’m thinking vampire or maybe a pirate. Arrrrg!