Hitting The Post-Party High

By Jennifer Kuhel

On school party holidays, my funmometer runs at a deficit.

I’m not the mom who wears the red sparkly headband with the boingy spring-loaded hearts on top. I haven’t effortlessly handcrafted whisper blue snowflake-bedazzled petit fours for the non-denominational winter holiday party. Nor have I relished in rolling up my sleeves with the first graders, happily plunging into the slime-coated chaos of pumpkin carving.

I’m thankful for the parents who do enjoy these things. Really, I am. I’m just not one of them.

I’m the mom who wants to stay at home and cherish every nanosecond of silence that comes before the children disembark from their bumbling yellow chariot. I think soothing thoughts as I watch them close in on the house, each bearing an oversized construction paper-stapled envelope, its contents a menagerie of festive pencils, putties, shiny curled ribbon and every parent’s frenemy: sugar.

To be clear, I want the kids to enjoy their holiday parties. Gosh knows I LOVED them when I was a kid. What’s more, I’m not anti-sugar. After all, I’m a baker. And the kids eat what I bake, both savory and sweet. What I’ve grown to dislike is the post-partyhigh, better known as the PPH. And what I’ve found is that it continues with or without the aid of sugar.

In my experience, the PPH is a small-scale version of what happens to your children on the days immediately before and the week (give or take) following their birthdays: they start to behave a lot like the kids you’re glad your kids aren’t.

Here’s what the Valentine’s Day PPH looked like this year:

CURTAIN RISES.

I sit alone in the kitchen, looking out the window, waving, as they enter the side door to the garage. Kitchen doorknob twists. Door swings open. Seven-year-old Anna, backpack scraping the floor while holding her white homemade party sack high, breaks the silence.

Anna: MOMMY! [Clearly, something in her makeshift sugar sack has brought her great joy. Then, in her best trilling sing-song,] “Guess what I haaaaaave?”

Me (singing in return): I don’t kno-oooooooooow…

Anna (smiling proudly, then nodding her head): FUN DIP!!! WOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

She takes note of my audible sigh. And promptly shelves it.

Anna: Can I have it? PLEEEEEEEASE?

Me (deflated): Gaaaaawwwwww…. all right. But you gotta eat it over a plate and you need to keep the bag upright. I don’t want that sugar everywhere. Otherwise, we’ll have an ants crawling all over the place in this kitchen.

Anna: Ooooooh. Ants! (She pauses, then looks again to me for approval.) Are you sure? If you don’t want me to eat it I won’t. (Her face is sincere.)

Me (realizing my sagging funmometer levels): Nope. Go ahead…just please please please eat it over a plate.

Anna carries the open Fun Dip over the plate to the table and promptly starts dipping the white candy stick into the crimson granules. She is clearly happy. Watching the red dust cascade onto the table (and likely the floor) I’m not sharing her joy, but I call on my powers of anxiety repression. Now it’s the five-year-old’s turn at PPH.

Josie (not leaving any excitement behind): MOMMY! I got a candy bracelet, can I eat it? Can I? CAN I? CANNNNIIIIIIIII????

Not to be left out, the fourth-grader rounds tops it off.

Olivia (Eyes bulging, arm extended a la Barker’s Beauties, holding up an entire sleev—yes, an ENTIRE sleeve—of Hershey’s chocolate snack bars): Look at all this CHOCOLATE!!

CURTAIN FALLS.

One more thing… did I mention that my children have Valentine’s Day off from school this year? Small detail.

But rather than Scrooge this holiday, I’m going to do my best to improve my funmometer score. As the kids say, YOLO. YOOOOOOOLOOOOOOWWWWW. Besides, sometime way back when, I was a kid. A kid who wanted to eat Fun Dip. A kid who wanted nothing more than to accessorize with candy bracelets and maybe smoke a candy cigarette. A kid who would have passed out over the excitement of being given an entire sleeve of Hershey’s snack bars.

I’m hoping if I throw caution to the wind, mindfully overlook the potential messes and sugar highs and channel little Jenny, that maybe this old lady can smoke and inhale enough to see what the PPH is all about. I’m not going to set myself up for failure by planning an activity that requires careful execution. I’m just gonna join in on their fun and see where it takes me.

Worst case scenario it gets me some extra hugs and kisses and a frosted pink cupcake.

And that’s a high that might be worth revisiting.

Jennifer Kuhel is a freelance writer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband, three daughters and a rarely empty laundry chute.

Subscribe to Brain, Child

By Sara Levine

One day the old witch hobbled out of her gingerbread house and found a boy and girl standing at the lollipop gate, staring at the colored icing and the peppermint candies studding the window shutters. Hungry and dirty, they’d no doubt been wandering in the woods for days. Good, the witch thought, who was half-starved herself. She gave them a moment to take in her appearance: the red eyes, the bulbous nose, the hump. The girl shrunk a little. The boy’s attention was fixed on the house.

“What’s it made of?” he asked.

“Sugar and spice and everything nice,” she answered.

“Real sugar?” the girl replied. “Or corn syrup?”

“Children, you must be starving! Break off a piece of the window!”

But the children stood with their hands in their pockets.

“Pry a shingle from the roof,” she said. “Do you like marzipan?”

They shook their heads. They’d never tried it.

“Poor children! Come in, come in.”

She sat them down at her table and offered them pancakes, caramel apples, jelly doughnuts. They wouldn’t touch any of it. This one was bad for the heart, they explained; that was packed with calories; those looked good but weren’t what their stepmother called “growing food.”

“Do you eat this food yourself, Old Mother?” Gretel asked, her forehead creased with worry, as the witch brought out a nutmeg maple cream pie.

“Not very much,” she answered, thinking of the tender morsels children made. “But I make sweets for the children who pass through the forest.”

“They must have terrible teeth,” Hansel said.

Prig! thought the witch. Probably their muscles had been subjected to long, vigorous exercise, and their meat would be stringy and tough.

“My little ones, you’ve got to eat something.”

The children looked doubtfully around the cottage. “Do you have any purslane?” Hansel asked at last.

Oh, to hell with fattening them. She’d eat them as they were. You take what comes to you; you appreciate; you don’t complain.

“Children, go and sit on the bread paddle,” she said, “and tell me if the oven feels hot enough to put the bread in.”

They looked at her warily. “We never eat white flour,” the girl said. “It has a higher glycemic index…”

“All I’ve offered, and you won’t help me with one little chore?” the witch said.

“But we don’t know a thing about ovens,” Gretel said. “When you heat food over 116 degrees, you lose the nutrient value.”

“Actually,” Hansel said, “enzymes degrade at a temperature of 106 degrees. That’s why Stepmother prefers raw food.”

The witch rolled her eyes up to the meringue-covered ceiling. These awful, difficult children! She could bake them for an hour, and they’d still be tough.

“Listen,” she said, “if you round the house and head west you will come to a patch of blueberry bushes you can eat from.”

The children stood, their faces flooded with relief. They thanked the old woman and bounded out the cottage door.

Goodbye, tainted meat, the witch thought. Only after she closed her graham cracker door did she remember the ogre. His house was a mile from the berry patch, and he loved nothing more than to gobble up wandering children. He’d been a good neighbor these last three or four hundred years. Should she warn him about the meat? The witch had hobbled as far as the gumdrop doormat when she stopped herself. Probably she was over-reacting.

Brain, Child (Winter 2010)

Sara Levine is the author of the novel Treasure Island!!! and the short story collection Short Dark Oracles. You can read more about her at sara-levine.com.

Tag Archives: sugar

Hitting The Post-Party High

Hansel and Regrettal