With another Halloween now in the books, I can now confirm that we have a true CandyFreak in our house. By "CandyFreak" I do not mean "A person who loves candy as no other food;" the oddity in our house is instead "A person who has a uniquely bizarre relationship with candy."
CandyFreak managed to walk a full four blocks this Halloween---a world record for him---so he came home with a fuller bag than in years past. As a responsible mother, I immediately removed all the gum, hard candies, and 100,000 Bars (my favorite!) but he still had plenty of treats left. At that point my husband solemnly informed both children, "Eat up tonight my friends, for tomorrow you are limited to 3 treats a day." The CandyFreak made no protest.
After dinner the next evening, both kids started digging in their bags. The normal child (who has an appropriately giant-sized "sweet tooth" like her mother) grabbed a chocolate thing for immediate gratification, a bag of pretzels for a salty twist, and a Tootsie Pop for lasting sugar pleasure. CandyFreak rooted around and finally came up with a yellow sucker.
A yellow sucker. Not a Tootsie Pop or a Blow Pop or a Charms Pop; a yellow sucker in a plain clear cellophane wrapper, the generic kind you might find in a doctor’s office. Where can you even buy such a sucker? Perhaps this is the kind of thing that comes in the giant Halloween value bag at the grocery (which I never get because it is filled with lousy candies I won’t eat). Adding to his CandyFreak reputation, he did not even open it at this point; he merely set it aside to consume later. I had to in fact REMIND him to bring the sucker when we went to watch a TV show together later.
While we were watching the show, CandyFreak decided to unwrap and have his yellow sucker ‘treat.’ The normal child by this time had already eaten her chocolate thing and her pretzels and was onto the Tootsie Pop. Just like the commercial with the owl, it took her about "3 licks to get to get center of the Tootsie Pop" before she was crunching down to the stick itself. "Quit chewing that stick!" I told her, then added to the boy "You too, don’t gnaw on that like an animal." CandyFreak slowly pulled out his yellow sucker to reveal a still-perfectly-formed oval of sugar, only slightly thinner for his having had it in his mouth. "Okay then," I said, without thinking too much of it.
Twenty minutes later, I noticed CandyFreak with the stick hanging out of his mouth like a cigarette. "Aren’t you done yet?" I asked him. Again, he showed me the sucker which was considerably smaller now but still whole on the stick. I had visions of the immediate formation of cavities as the sugar slooooooooowwwwwwwly sat in his mouth during this sucker marathon.
Another twenty minutes and still he was not finished. My husband told him "That’s the right way to do it, don’t bite it!" CandyFreak showed me the tiny bit of yellow still attached to the stick---so tiny, the yellow sucker part was the same shape as the stick itself. Then he put in back in his mouth and I heard a tiny "snap." He smiled mischievously and held up the perfectly white stick. "Put that in the trash, boy," I remarked flatly; I was now truly concerned that this child might have been switched at birth in the hospital, and my real child was somewhere vomiting up his entire bag of Halloween chocolates which were eaten in one fell swoop.
CandyFREAK.