Every year we try to grow a big pumpkin. Some years are better than others but this year turned out to be our biggest pumpkin yet. When we first had kids I enjoyed carving pumpkins with them and didn’t mind being the pumpkin gut scooper. After being in charge of scooping guts for the past 17 years I’m getting a little tired of it. Fortunately, the big one didn’t have too many guts. Instead it was the small green pumpkins that were hard to clean out.
The kids wanted to do something spectacular with the big pumpkin but my carving skills are limited and by the time I got all the pumpkins cleaned out I didn’t feel like spending a lot more time on carving so instead of a spectacular pumpkin they got the standard smiling jack-o-lantern. Still, I think it turned out pretty well.
We got a lot of comments from trick-or-treaters about the pumpkin. Most people said “where did you buy that?” and when I told them we grew it in our backyard they were suitably impressed. The only problem with such a big one is that it’s going to take forever to decompose in our back yard.
Caroline went trick-or-treating as Hermione Granger with her friends, while Diana dressed up as Tigger and went trick-or-treating with her friend from next door.
Anne is at that strange age where you’re too old to trick-or-treat and you’re not quite old enough to go to cool Halloween parties with friends. She debated whether or not to go trick-or-treating at all with me encouraging her to stay home and hang out with me and Nancy and Emily. In the end she decided that a odd Hungarian girl costume (I think?) with a friend was better than staying home with parents and older siblings.
Sam was a ninja and went out with his buddies. They all returned home at different times where I did “inspection” on their candy and made sure they all paid their “Dad tax”.