Jack-o-Lantern

After letting it sit in our living room for a month and a day, we finally decided to carve our pumpkin.

We got a little pattern book that came with some carving tools for pretty cheap, so we flipped through the book and found a cool pattern that didn't look too difficult. Since our pumpkin is huge, I had to enlarge the pattern a little bit.

I put it on the scanner and did the preview scan. It looked good, so I took the book off of the scanner and then hit the scan button. Oddly enough, my scan came up empty. I was puzzled. I knew I had previewed it and it looked okay. Why did it come up blank?

I checked the scanner bed. There was nothing in it. I had misplaced the book between previewing it and actually scanning it. I couldn't remember doing anything with it. I tell you, motherhood will do that to you!

Andrew eventually found it and this time he did the scanning. With that out of the way, we commenced carving.


The pumpkin was really pretty thick so it was hard to get through. It was pretty hollow though, so scooping out all the gunk didn't take very long at all. We told Rachel that this goopy stuff is what she'll be eating in a few months. She didn't seem very impressed, but soon after our mentioning "eating," Rachel decided that eating was a good idea and began to get a little fussy.


That left Andrew to do the majority of the work. The hardest part was using the little pounce wheel to transfer the pattern onto the pumpkin. The tool is smaller than my thumb and was rather difficult to hold and control. I transfered about half of the pattern and carved out the flame under the cauldron before Rachel decided that absolutely could wait no longer, so I had to sit back and watch Andrew work.

I was so nervous the whole time because he kept saying, "Ooh!" in a very earnest voice.

"What?!" I would ask, afraid that he'd broken some essential part off or cut himself or something else tragical.

"Nothing," he'd say casually.

We ooh-ed and what-ed each other for about twenty minutes or so when I finally stopped paying attention to Andrew, due to paying increased attention to the baby. He was a little miffed when he gasped his 'ooh' and got no response from me. Talk about the boy who called wolf! Is my husband starved for attention or what?

He ended up doing a splendid job; the pumpkin looked mighty fine and he was beaming.


We were so excited about our jack-o-lantern that we put a candle in it and started switching off all the lights. Just as we turned off the last light, I realized that we had neglected to clean up after ourselves, had left three knives laying on the kitchen floor, and were about to venture off across the knife-laden floor barefoot. So we turned the lights back on, cleaned up, and then enjoyed our freshly roasted pumpkin seeds by the flickering candlelight of our jack-o-lantern.

We stared at it for so long and took so many pictures--we couldn't decide which ones were our favorites. We're big fans of them all.