Pumpkin Carving

I look forward to carving pumpkins every year. Matthew does too. In fact when I told him that we would do it first thing in the morning, he held me to it and we began carving pumpkins before breakfast. After the first two were carved we took a break because somebody besides me was also hungry. 

“Someone is being cranky,” he observed about his sister. 

“She’s not cranky, she’s hungry,” I explained.

“Somebody is being chunky,” he corrected. 

A barfing pumpkin was the huge hit. Matthew had successfully turned the pipe cleaners I took out for spider legs into a light saber for his pumpkin but I taught him that I do know a thing or two about cool pumpkins. “Oh my goodness! What is that? It’s so funny,” he giggled. “I can’t even stop laughing.”  This still didn’t change his vision for my spider pumpkin. He clogged one of the eyes with guts and declared it a pirate spider pumpkin. 

“What should we make this one say?” I asked before carving into the largest one. 

He wrote on piece of paper with marker asking me how to spell certain words. When he was finished he put his sign over the bowl of pumpkin seeds. The sign read, ‘These seeds are pumpkin’. That wasn't quite what I had in mind so instead I carved the word 'boo'.

Matthew wants to like toasted pumpkin seeds. Each year he keeps trying them, hoping he will like eating them but there is something about the taste of them that he doesn’t like.  “These pumpkin seeds are so good, they taste like potato chips,” he claims, not eating a second one. “I like them now.”   He seems to enjoy the tradition of baking them on a cookie sheet after we’re done carving pumpkins more than the taste of them.