...NOW they're candy cigarettes.

So as the kids have returned to school, a little of their Easter candy has trickled it.  One of those items that came home to day (a la pinkeye boy) was a box of candy sticks.  I remember these.  You remember these.  In the old days, they were candy cigarettes.  You'd get them out and "smoke them" as long as you could, nibbling them down to a tiny little butt, then with a quick bite, not make the butt mess that real cigarettes cause.

Wanting my kids to have the authentic experiences of yore (which now mostly come in dollar boxes rather than nickel and dime bins), I made with the red food coloring on one end, so now my kids can blaze up like I did back in the days when smoking wasn't a capital crime worse than pulling out your ballsack in the mall.

I think this is part of that whole movement to sanitize childhood.  And I'm talking about more than the bottles of antibacterial goo dotting the landscape of kid-dom these days. It's the idea we can protect our children from every danger big or small, and shield them from every idea that isn't written in a parenting manual.  Not so for my youngling.

This includes playing in dirt, playing with real tools, working around a hot stove (except when deep frying, of course, and supervised), cutting stuff (with actual knives, supervised), watching things that don't have the stamp of approval of the "kid experts" (except the sexual stuff), secondhand smoke, strange dogs, bees, falling on concrete and stone, talking to strange adults, and smoking candy cigarettes.

Because if they get to do all this stuff, then they'll ask about it.  And then I can teach them....