Marriage Tip: Halloween Candy-Stealing Dad

Sometimes I feel like one of the sitcom-wives off of a television show who gives her husband wise advice but he doesn’t listen. First I’m going to give you a marriage tip: Halloween candy-stealing dad is a no-no.

I am married to a man with a sweet tooth. No, that is really downplaying it. I’m married to a man with a candy-coated tummy.

How bad is it? Well let’s put it this way; every Halloween Vance ripped off our kids and tricked them into giving him their chocolate bars…Oh yes, he did! Now Vance would argue I’m over exaggerating. But really I’m not.

A month before Halloween Vance would ask me to buy him a box of 100 mini chocolate bars. My husband would then plan on trading with the kids when they got home on Halloween night. But Vance would replace that box above five times before Halloween arrived. Where those chocolate bars went…I’ll never know.

But for some reason, his belt needed an extra hole in it every November.

Halloween Night would arrive and Vance would wait for the kids to pour out their pillowcases of candy on the table. You know, the treats they earned by walking uphill for ten miles in the cold and rain – ya, those ones. Vance would then barter with his darling, little, innocent angels.

For some mysterious reason, he seemed to have five times the amount of candy he started out with, in the first place. I’m totally into math, and this wasn’t adding up right.

It must have been a Halloween phenomenon.

The kid’s stack seemed to shrink progressively by the end of the evening. I would shake my head as I was doing dishes in the background. I wondered why Vance wasn’t a lawyer or a used car salesman.

Then we had Eythan, our fifth baby and youngest of the bunch…another lawyer. This kid was having no part in his dad’s scheming and pretty soon Eythan’s bartering tactics were working in his favour.

I chuckled from behind the scenes. Vance had finally met his match. If someone hadn’t stopped him, I was going to wrap some Exlax in the Tootsie Roll papers and take him for a long walk in a public place.

Which brings me to our chocolate-bar walk the other day.

It’s a beautiful, crisp fall day. I suggest to my husband and my son Devyn, that we go for a walk at Fort Creek. I really wanted some exercise and a quick, brisk walk would do the trick.

Five minutes in, I turn around and Vance is lagging behind. I keep slowing down so he can catch up. I’m feeling good! This keeps happening over and over again. Finally, I ask him if he just didn’t want to go for a walk? “No, it’s just that I ate too much at the church potluck and then those two chocolate bars right after…”

I warned him not to eat the chocolate bars. But oh no, he never listens to me – his sitcom-wife.