TRICKY TREATS

As a person who spent about a thousand years trying not to put an eyelash out of line (until she got enough therapy to resurrect something from the Paleozoic), caring for two humans under the age of four usually puts my blood pressure somewhere around anaconda-strangling-a-mule-deer. Add to this the holiday of refined sugar and running across streets in the dark and you have a recipe for all the primal screaming you could ever hope to choke on while smiling under your monarch butterfly hat.

To up the ante, because why not, one of my children, who shall remain anonymous, recently bit a hole in one of the preschool teacher’s sweaters (which I limply offered to patch, but haven’t heard back). What this particular child needs is to be on a 1798 farmstead, laboring in the fields about 19 hours a day with every layer of black-hole-dense musculature available to it. But alas, the Industrial age and everything afterwards intervened, and I am left to try and navigate my children through a society whose values make my head spin.

Regardless, whatever I may or may not understand about how kids work and why things go awry, my shame and anxiety response to Sweatergate was about as potent as if I’d personally just drowned a sack of kittens.

So you can see why we needed a bit of a lighthearted holiday.