A pumpkin story
I’m feeling rather lazy and there’s not a whole lot of narrative to dish out anyway, so today you get a post that’s mostly pictures.
We (and by that I mean I) decided that we needed to actually get a full-sized pumpkin and make a Jack-O-Lantern this year. In the past, we’ve just gotten a couple of tiny pumpkins and let The Boy decorate them with markers or stickers (and one year we did the same thing with a big pumpkin), but I figure he’s getting old enough now to start remembering things for years to come. I can’t have him thinking that we were slacker parents.
So, we bundled up to face the frigid Texas autumn weather (about mid-50s, but people around here start acting like Nanook of the North anytime it dips below 60°) on Tuesday and headed down to our neighborhood pumpkin patch. Once we got there, The Girl spent a great deal of time inspecting all of the pumpkins, pounding them with her little fists and labeling them “ba”:
I let The Boy get a pair of small pumpkins for tradition’s sake:
The patch had been pretty picked over, but we were able to find a winner to take home:
On Wednesday, we sat down and carved the pumpkin. The Boy was grossed out by the gooey, stringy pumpkin innards:
I wasn’t too keen on them either:
After a while, The Boy got tired of watching me scrape out pumpkin junk, so he went off to play on the computer. Finally, after about a half-hour of scraping, muttering and carving, we ended up with the final product:
What’s with the tumors on the pumpkins in the first picture?
Also between the little pumpkins and the gourds on the tarp, I see a giant pile of dead fish. Tell me those are not dead fish.
Cute pumpkin face, I’m pretty sure mine will be much simpler this year than they were last year.
They had a lot of tumor-laden pumpkins this year. I’m not sure what that’s all about. I did read an article a while back saying that all of the late moisture this year had impacted pumpkin crops. Maybe it made them all bumpy as well?
Those are not dead fish. They’re dried out Indian corn husks and general pilgrimesque bric-a-brac.
I’m extremely bad at art in all of its various forms, so that pumpkin face is about as advanced as I get.
Great pumpkin pictures! You should totally look into the pumpkin carving stencils. They are really easy to do and you get cute little saws to cut with! You can see the pumpkin I carved with the stencil on my Facebook (under the album “Nathan 7 months”). Hope you guys have a great Halloween!!
BTW… so glad that wasn’t a pile of dead fish!!