Pumpkins and a visit

Yesterday was a great day. My Mom drove the 3 hours to visit us for the day and we loved it. While Jay was at school, Rose soaked up the one-on-one Grama attention with piles of books. I soaked up some food that she brought, along with good conversation. She made us dinner and a batch of bread. AND unloaded/loaded the dishwasher. I felt so relaxed and happy at the end of the day instead of worn out and cranky like my giant pregoself usually is after 12 hours of awake time. It was a peaceful happy day.

 

We love Grama Meri!

In other news…it’s pumpkin time! A few weeks ago, our friends invited us to come get pumpkins from the flourishing pumpkin patch in their yard. They had at least a hundred! So we drove over and each selected a pumpkin, with an extra for baby Amber, just in case (sigh, if only). I felt kind of bad because on the way there, Jay was saying how he wanted to pick a big big big pumpkin. When he found a nice large one, I jokingly said “how are you going to carry that to the van?” thereby unwittingly destroying his desire for a large pumpkin. Poor Jay! In spite of my best efforts to assure him that Jeff would carry the big one for him, he picked a regular sized one instead and insisted on carrying it to the car himself. Rude mom-moment! Sorry Jay!

In keeping with boring wimpy pregnant Shaina, I did not actually carve my own pumpkin this year. I “helped” Jeff carve one a few weeks ago at a friend’s house and then I helped Rose do hers this week. That was plenty for me this year. Did you know it kind of takes abs to cut, scoop, and carve a pumpkin? Yep, and I sure don’t have any of those right now. I was out of breath after a few scoops while I helped Rose with her pumpkin. Whew, but we made it through and here’s what it looked like:

 

[they were mildly grossed out at first]

[but not for long]

This is the first year that Jay and Rose both cleaned out most of the pumpkin guts on their own. It was awesome.

Words of wisdom from Jeff, after laboriously helping Jay carve a face on his pumpkin: “the hardest part about helping a kindergartener do something is not doing it yourself.” Yes.

Rose gave hers lots of freckles after I put the face on it. I let her pick what shapes she wanted for the eyes, nose, and mouth, and then how many teeth she wanted. Then she decorated it with dots.

It was raining outside when we put out the pumpkins, so I couldn’t quite get the glowing pumpkin picture of my dreams, but rest assured I did try, however briefly. That blasted porch railing covered up the 2 week-old pumpkin that is currently molded to our front step—literally. White mold is fluffing out its back and the whole inside is black and oozing juice. Very Halloweeny.

We only had 2 tea lights left from last year so I improvised with two of our big decorative candles just for the picture. After briefly admiring the glow, we carefully removed those fancy candles and put them back in their wall sconces in the family room. They were nice and big for those giant pumpkins, though—there’s something to be said for a candle to match the pumpkin size.

[Amber’s pumpkin remains uncarved]

[As does mine]

One more week!