Hide your candy!

Do y'all remember Claudia Kishi from The Babysitters' Club (yes, I know my age is showing)?  She was the "Japanese American artist" babysitter and the club meetings were always held in her room.  One of the coolest things about Claudia was NOT that she was relate-able as an Asian American teen (I didn't think she was at all).  It was NOT that she had two, count them TWO, piercings in each ear.  It was NOT that she had her own private phone line.  It was most definitely NOT that she wasn't smart but she was good at art and that made it all okay.  It was that she had junk food (read: CANDY) stashed all over her room and would pull it out at random.

Okay, maybe it was only cool to me.  But it's really all because of my mom.

My mom was a trendsetter and I credit her with being the originator of the health food and raw food craze.  As kids, we brought dried seaweed and alfalfa sandwiches to school for lunch, drank chunky fruit smoothies (Smoothie is not really the correct classification.  It was more like fruit soup.  She took every fruit in existence and blended them into a chunky brown mixture that we drank / chewed) every morning and were forbidden to eat white bread.  The ice cream we bought on occasion, mint chocolate chip ice cream, was the least junky of the ice cream flavours.

Side argument: It's not real ice cream and you know it.  The mint chocolate isn't sweet and the whole creation is a bit like eating frozen toothpaste.

Even our birthday cakes were covered with fruit.

Consequently, whenever my sister and I saw junk food, we would freak.  To this day, when I see junk food, I still feel the urge to eat IT ALL NOW because my mom might swoop out of nowhere and take it all away. Which is why, at my house, I hide junk food.  From myself.  I mention this because I did not hide the above jar of candy corn Halloween M&Ms.  And now it's gone.

So maybe Claudia Kishi and I have more in common than I thought.