My wife and her mom went to an out-of-town concert last weekend, so I solo-parented my sons for a few days. That’s normally not too big a deal except I was in zombie-mode from a sinus infection that had me blasting blood from my nose like a super villain was ESP-crushing my brain.
I’d promised the boys we would carve pumpkins, which translates to I’d carve pumpkins for them. We settled down at the dining room table, where my oldest was grossed out by the thought of touching the innards of the king-sizer he selected, while my youngest went to town on his, refusing all help despite accomplishing absolutely nothing in terms of deseeding and depulping his pumpkin.
After finally gutting the things and getting gourd viscera up to my elbows, we sat down to work. The oldest couldn’t figure out what he wanted carved in his pumpkin, while the youngest wanted everything he’s ever been interested in, and in exacting detail. I got him to go for a T-Rex. Unlike his brother, he had selected a small pumpkin he considered to be “his size,” so I had the surface area of a small cantaloupe to work with. We also couldn’t find the etching tools for the pumpkin, so I used a flat-head screwdriver to cut, chisel, and chip that dinosaur into the pumpkin.
The result was a beaut, though: it was a profile view, where I scraped out the eye, nostril, teeth, individual fingers, some striping and prominent keratinous scaling, and even some muscle delineation in the thigh, calf, and tail. My youngest looked at it and realized all he wanted was a tyrannosaurus shaped hole cookie-cuttered into it.
So I dug that T-Rex out chunk by chunk, carving away an hour of work into the trash can, and left the pumpkin looking like it had a ragged exit wound instead of a glorious theropod. Meanwhile, my oldest son decided on a ninja sword, which I etched into the pumpkin. It’s looking pretty good except that his brother came by and picked pieces off it at one point, and two days ago I discovered the pumpkin was dissolving away like I’d filled it with Liquid-Plumr, and it’ll probably cave in on itself in another night or two.
I was doing all that instead of watching the Virginia Tech game live, and boy, did I come out ahead.
Okay, let’s start at the end.
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