Halloween Candy

Its November 1 today and kids danced around with happy thoughts of last nights trick or treating...or if they were like mine were super grumpy from being up a smidgen past bedtime!
It seems my son is going gluten free for good. We arent 100% sure yet but its looking promising. We are adding dairy back into his life and holding our breath that it will be ok! Next will come eggs.
This halloween I entered a whole new world and marvelled at what a lot of parents go through every year and every holiday for that matter! Weeding through all the edibles and plucking the 'dangerous' ones. We put our kids to bed and I dumped their bags out on the table to sort...and sort...and sort!
Just to name a few odd finds:
Did you know Twizzlers have wheat flour in them and Mars bars have eggs? Smarties have wheat flour...now that made me really sad! About half their bags went away (we kept the 1.5 year olds stash safe just in case big brother got into it). I know he's not even 3 and he wont know the difference this year but thoughts of years to come filled my mind. Hopefully by next year it will just be gluten Im hunting for but this year made me really sit up and take notice.
And I take my hat off to the parents who have several kids with allergies or one kid with several allergies. In our world of celebrating everything with food its a tough job!
I was reading some ideas to make Halloween easier and came across quite a few:

1. (obviously for a bit older) Set up a pre-arranged amount for each type of candy (penny, nickle etc) and buy out the offending candy and let them pick safe stuff or a toy the next day. Then mom and dad get the candy to munch on!
2. The day before go to all the houses you would be at on Halloween and leave a note that you wont be collecting candy due to allergies but rather spare change for the Ronald McDonald childrens charities. Take the money into The Ronald McDonald house the next day and then stop at the toy store and the kids get to pick out one small toy each. One family said they have put 4 families through the RM House so far doing this!
3. Have your own allergy free candy at home to swap out that night with their stuff.

The list goes on and on but these were some of the more do-able ones. Lets face it, kids wont die if they dont get to have candy but we all know what its like being completely left out of all the fun :( and the less attention you draw to what they can have vs what they cant have, the better.

Over the next couple months my goal is to come up with a gluten free cake for his birthday that actually tastes good!

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