Pie?

It’s birthday season among my daughter’s circle of friends.  This month will bring a couple of birthday parties, with their fun, and their inherent food obstacles.  We’ve gotten the basics down pretty well, but last weekend’s party brought a challenge we’d never had before.

“Mommy, if I get picked to get a pie in the face, can I do it?  How would we bolus for it?”

It was a very clever Nickelodeon Game Show-style party, where a host gave the children a series of challenges such as throwing rubber chickens into a soup pot, and balancing plastic plates on the birthday girl's head.  The winners were given tokens for prizes, or the opportunity to pie someone in the face.  It turns out the “pie in the face” was just a paper plate full of aerosol whipped cream which, when aimed by a 9 year old peer, ended up mostly in one’s nose anyway.   My daughter did not have the honor of being “pied,” but of course she could have participated.  A little whipped cream is a negligible treat given the amount of pizza and cake that was later to come.

I try to make my answer “yes” when the question is whether my child can do something “even though she has diabetes.”  It should always be so.  Even if the pie was of the gloopy coconut cream variety, we would have figured it out, or made a guess.  More math, blood sugar checks, my staying during the party to be able to judge exactly how much pie went in the mouth versus the nose would all be worth a bit of salvaged childhood.  After all, it’s not every day you get the opportunity to be pied in the face.  But it is every day we live with the drudgery of diabetes.

One lucky winner had the honor of sitting in the “booger blaster.”   This prize involved green slime pouring on her from a giant nose attached to the ceiling. While, yes, I would have let my kid do it if she wanted to,  for many reasons I’m thankful I didn’t have to ask the manager how many carbs were in the boogers.