On Girl Scout Cookies...

It’s that dreaded season again: the GirlScouts are on the warpath to sell a few cookies and win a few hearts. When I was a kid, this time of year was one of the few during which my parents allowed foods in the house that weren’t whole wheat, homemade or downright good for us. And that was only to prevent awkward run-ins with our neighbors at the grocery store. It was either buy those cookies or face future chance meetings ending in a polite departure laden with the unspoken but clearly understood, “I’ll never forget that you didn’t support my daughter, and by the end of the week, the rest of the neighbors will know about it too. Okay then, bye, bye.” Well, few things have changed over the years, and despite the recession, these little rites of passage trudge on. So no big surprise a whole generation later, several of our cutest neighbors have hit us up for a little “donation” with the same promise of a neighborly outcast unless we cheerfully oblige.

When I was younger and my siblings and I were bound to our parent’s strict food policies, those seemingly innocent boxes—with their depictions of girls learning life skills and building their self esteem—may as well have been the last mouse among a herd of starving stray cats. We would tear into them the first chance we’d get, licking the crumbly remains from our paws before Mom even finished writing the check. For me, Girl Scout Cookies may as well be crack. The last thing I need is to have them lurking in my pantry when I’ve spent years trying to avoid them.

When the first Girl Scout arrived at our door and my five-year-old stood next to me, eyes wide and mouth open, I restrained my old twitch as I wrote the check and invited those salacious plastic towers inside. This is the first year that Jack is in tune with this annual ritual, and it’s the first year in a long time that I couldn’t buy them and immediately cart them off to my husband’s office to avoid a breakdown. I wasn’t a Girl Scout, but I had to participate in school fundraisers when I was young and I remember how awful it was to be met with rejection. Despite my teasing, I’m always on board when it comes to supporting kids fundraisers, as long as they’re the ones doing the work, of course.

Oprah’s Dr. Oz says that no matter what kind of food you bring into your house, you should never put a limit on how much your kids eat. To me this makes sense. My husband always had the worst garbage known to man in every corner of his home and today he’s not only one of the healthiest eaters I know, he doesn’t really care much about sweets. So we decided early on that, like my parents, we would buy only the healthiest of foods for our kids, but if one of those unfortunate high fructose corn syrup options found their way into our house - i.e. Halloween, play date offering, etc. – we would let it stay and run its course. So we didn’t put a limit on how many Girl Scout cookies Jack ate as long as he’d had a substantially healthy choice prior to digging into the box. It took every ounce of restraint I had at my disposal from stopping him as he mowed through eight cookies at a time. But after a week he did stop, and now we have a box and a half left in the pantry. Apparently I’m the only one who hears them incessantly calling my name.

Our decidedly unscientific methodology is to provide healthy options, while not ignoring all the poor choices our kids are bombarded with on a daily basis, and hopefully ensuring those choices don’t turn into cravings because they feel deprived. For instance, when we first moved to Arkansas for some reason Jack was offered a lollipop everywhere we went—from drycleaner to pharmacist. I got so tired of him acting like he’d never met a lollipop he didn’t like that I bought a clear, decorative glass jar and filled it with Dum Dums, keeping it in full view on the kitchen island. After awhile it became so much a part of his landscape that he stopped asking. Who knows if I’m taking the right approach or not, but he’s a skinny little thing and doesn’t seem obsessed with sweets like I was, er, am. I don’t know if this proves any theory, but for now, I’ll take it.

On a side note, I do think it needs to be said that while the Girl Scout big wigs were probably making their cookies attractive on yet another level by assigning cutesy names, you can’t help but see the irony. Shouldn’t “Tagalongs” really be “Can’t believe these Girl Scout cookies have been tagging along my thighs since February?” Or Do-Si-Dos: “I’m going to have to Do-Si-Do my buns off if I eat these.” Thin Mints: the oxymoron of the century. My favorite, however, is the company’s “Thanks-a-lots.” And so I humbly suggest an alternative to its given name: “Yo, Girl Scouts, thanks a lot for sabotaging my New Years Resolution diet in less than a month!”