Jack-o'-Lanterns 2009

Last night, The Boyfriend and I finally got around to carving our pumpkins. As I've mentioned before, we've carved pumpkins for the past two years, which in my world is absolutely long enough to be called a tradition. So this year was our third annual pumpkin carving event. Since our pumpkins were a little bit on the small side, we bought a couple pumpkins at the store a couple weeks ago. Interestingly, The Boyfriend ended up choosing a fairly small one anyway, figuring the smaller the pumpkin, the sooner he would be done with his carving duties. (He really does enjoy it, I swear!) We had good intentions to do our carving the last couple of weeks, but kept putting it off. So last night, we set up shop in the garage and went at it.

This year I was going for redemption. Three years ago I was carving pumpkins with a friend of mine who had never carved a pumpkin before. Thinking I would keep it pretty simple, I decided to carve "BOO" into my pumpkin. As I came around the bottom of the B, however, lining up that bottom curvy cut just perfectly with the left edge of the B, I realized I had made a grave mistake. The whole B just fell right out of the pumpkin. Duh, you all say. But I hadn't thought it through (obviously). My B had no middle, and I'm pretty sure I just followed suit for the subsequent O's. My disappointment was matched only by my embarrassment at making such a rookie mistake.

This year, I set out to redeem myself. The Boyfriend knew my carving plans but would not unveil his. He usually goes for a scary face. (Although last year he did carve BOO in the back of his jack-o'-lantern just to irk me. It worked.) He finished his small pumpkin first and put it on the porch. When I finally finished mine and took it around the corner to join its little buddy, I fell in love with the Jack-o'-Lanterns 2009. Now I'm crossing my fingers for just one trick-or-treater so someone besides us and the two people who read this blog will see our masterpieces.

It's everything I hoped for this past spring when I planted our pumpkins. Sure, we didn't actually carve our pumpkins, but we carved pumpkins, together, in our house. As we sat out in the garage, it was exactly what I had envisioned. Except that in my head, we would have been eating chocolate. I forgot the chocolate. Well, there's always next year.