It’s all my fault. Reap what you sow, they say. For once, “they” are right.

We had a relatively sugar-free home for Penny’s first two years of life. We never served dessert after meals, snacked on cheese and pretzels, and had her convinced that tofu was the most spectacular food in the world. Then I began potty training.

We mothers do rash and wild things to get our kids to eliminate on demand. I performed the funky chicken dance every time she used the potty because I knew she loved it. But my funky chicken quickly lost its funk and left her whining for more.

My dance repertoire insufficient, I looked for another incentive. Candy was the obvious answer.

Every week for the past three months, Penny and I made a trip to the candy shop and I let her pick out her week’s worth of “potty candy.”

Candy corns, Dreamy Mints, Gummy Worms, pastilles, candied nuts, she’s tried them all. The candy sits in a bag in the bathroom and she picks out a special piece after each successful trip to the potty. I would also do periodic “dry panties” checks during the day for which she was rewarded with candy. She was quickly potty trained.

And now what do we have left? A candy monster.

Penny has learned to scale the highest cabinet, plumb the deepest shelf, and beguile any poor sucker in order to get her precious candy. For the sweets she can’t unwrap herself, she’ll patiently chew the wrapper for upwards of half an hour to get at the goodies inside. I find little piles of Hershey Kisses foil in neat piles underneath the kitchen table like mice droppings as evidence of her clandestine activities.

Yesterday she went too far. Somehow she got inside my bathroom cabinet and found two boxes of my contact lenses. To a two-year-old, what else could they have been but candy?

She whisked the boxes to a secure location and set at work ripping them open. When I noticed, twenty minutes later, the eerie calm that had settled over the apartment, I went to find what mischief she was up to.

There, in a tiny ball behind the sofa, Penny crouched. She was wearing only her white Elmo panties, and by the way her ribs were sticking out of her thin body and the desperation in her eyes, she looked exactly like Gollum. Her tiny teeth were busily at work at one of my contacts packages.

She punctured the foil and was frantically trying to suck out the saline contents before I could interfere. At $26 a box, I wasn’t going to let this one slide with a motherly chuckle.

I grabbed the box away before she could destroy my contacts. “Candy! Candy! Candy!” she shrieked and then sent out a wail to the skies. Seeing that I wasn’t going to return her prize, she ran off and grabbed a stool.

Her mourning period over, she was off to try and reach another candy stash on top of her Dad’s dresser. I quickly beat her to it and put the candy on a higher shelf. But not before she had dashed off again. “Candy! Candy!”

Her persistence was terrible indeed. Now in the kitchen, she snatched the sugar jar. Before I could stop her she had it open and was digging out huge scoops of sugar to shove in her mouth.

At this point, I couldn’t resist—I laughed myself sick and let her have a few more desperate handfuls before cleaning up the sticky mess.

Penny started detox today. She has been nervously watching TV, wandering forlornly around in the kitchen while I do dishes, and occasionally muttering to me about how dry her panties are. I won’t give in.

Penny’s sugar mania was reaching such outlandish lengths that I feared for our “sweet” five-month-old, Charlotte. Two days ago I entered the front room to find that Penny had dumped brown sugar and flour all over the baby. Could it be she was preparing to eat her? I hope never to know.

We’ll not be returning to the accursed candy shop.

Sarah Flake is the author of a humor blog at hollywoodflakes.org that has approximately 10,000 readers a month.