“Sticky Candy Weekend”
This past weekend was one of those rare times when almost all of our kids were home. With more than half of them all grown up and living in different cities, we don’t get to see them all together anymore. On Friday night we had a bunch of friends over for burgers. It was a delightful way to start the weekend! Then on Saturday eight of the nine kids were here and we spent most of our time just hanging out and eating.
In preparation for the weekend, I went to Costco last Tuesday to load up on groceries. I got stuff to make burgers, fancy sandwiches, big breakfasts and snacks. One of the snacks I decided to get was an enormous bag of candy that’s meant for handing out on Halloween. It had tiny chocolate bars, Gobstoppers and little cardboard boxes of Nerds inside. These seemed perfect for putting in a big bowl on the c 2offee table so everyone could just grab a piece when they felt like it.
The one hitch in my idea was that the day I bought the candy it was 100° outside. Since I was running other errands I decided to put the big bag of candy in the cooler with ice so the chocolate wouldn’t melt. I was so proud of my decision until I got home that night to discover that the ice had mostly melted and had seeped into the big bag. I took it out of the cooler, cut open the top and drained the big bag of pink water.
“Why is the water pink?” I wondered as I dumped the tiny wrapped candies onto a towel that I had laid out on the kitchen counter. After investigating, I saw that about 15 boxes of Nerds had gotten wet and dissolved in the water. Oh well….I just threw those away, left the rest of the candy on the towel to dry overnight and didn’t give it another thought. I mean, who worries about tiny wet candy?
But this seemingly insignificant detail turned out to be a central problem all weekend. All of the little bitty candy bars, I found the next day when I picked them up to put them in a bowl, were so sticky that every time anyone ate a piece of candy they had to go wash their hands. Also, some of the chocolate bars had a weird cherry flavor to them (even though, as far as I could tell, no water got inside of the individual packages). It became the joke of the weekend, whether or not it was worth the effort to eat a piece of the sticky, icky candy.
But they all braved the stickiness and ate whle we played games and talked all day.
Our favorite game lately is called Heads Up. It’s an app that is kinda like charades but easier and funnier. You hold the phone up to your forehead and try to guess what the screen says. My family is particularly good at the Super Heroes and Villains category. Everyone but me that is. I don’t know any of those answers unless it is Batman, Superman or Spider-Man. And even those would take me way too long to figure out. I’ll be staring at 10 people all yelling at me at once with clues about capes or sidekicks and I don’t know the difference! Then the timer buzzes the end of my turn and they look at me like they feel sorry for me because I don’t know Batman’s true identity or how Superman got his powers.
It’s fun because we don’t really keep score, we just take turns and enjoy the process. There’s too much laughing to worry with writing down points. And besides, our fingers were too sticky from eating candy from the bowl.
By Sunday afternoon everyone was gone or doing their own thing and I was so worn out from 3 days of family and friends (plus a church service that knocked my socks off and challenged my spirit), that I wanted to sleep from 2-6:00. So I stopped by Redbox on my way home from church and rented myself an afternoon nap. When I got home (we were in separate cars) I tossed the movie to the kids and said, “Boys, the house is clean, there is plenty of leftover food and sticky candy, we’ve had a nice weekend together and Mom is tired. Here’s a movie. Eat what you want and watch it twice.”
And I slept. I barely woke up to eat a bit of dinner and went back to bed.
And if my family time and long nap weren’t enough of a blessing, I woke up Monday morning to rain and cool weather. I am a huge fan of dark, gloomy, cool weather. It feeds my soul.
I learned several lessons over the weekend. 1. Don’t put candy in a cooler of ice on a hot day 2. I don’t know enough about superheroes to play that category in Heads Up and 3. Redbox is like magic.
Have a good one!