Pumpkin Faces

This weekend my in-laws had their second annual pumpkin carving contest. It is mostly a chance for the cousins to carve their pumkins all together, but a few of the adults take it a bit more seriously. Eric's brother, Gary, is an incredible self-taught artist and his talent is easily translated into professional-looking carved pumpkins. And despite my lobbying for Gary to be a category unto himself for our pumpkin carving contest, he won 1st place again. His is the first picture on this post, and I have to admit wholeheartedly he deserves it. Here are the pictures of my lil' pumpkins and their award winning pumpkin faces.
Finn won the "Most Original" award for his Sherlock Holmes pumpkin. Please note the top hat and pipe which make it most decidedly a Halloween nod to the famous detective. These days Finn and Eric are so into watching Sherlock Holmes on PBS, that Finn has even started reading the book.

Another thing Finn is into these days is the tuba. He started the before school band last week. Since he is the only kid who is playing the tuba, the band teacher has a tuba he can play at the school and another one he can bring home and practice. That way he doesn't have to lug the instrument back and forth. The morning after he brought his tuba home, Eric and I were still in bed when we heard the melodious honk of this "delicate" horn at 7:30am. I went downstairs and told Finn though I appreciated his enthusiasm for a musical instrument, he couldn't play it that early in the morning. He recounted the circumstance that led to his playing the tuba. He was trying to wake Annie up and she just wouldn't get up. So he resorted to getting his tuba out of its case and going to Annie's room to play it in her face. Who knew the tuba had a dual purpose. Not only does it provide the bass line in a band, it also can be a quite effective wake-up call. Just ask Annie. And speaking of Annie, here is her award-winning pumpkin:

She won 4th place for her Monster-Ghost, which was quite gracious of her to give herself the last place since she was the judge. (You might of noticed that there are varying awards in this contest-not only things like "Most Original" , but also 1st, 2nd, etc. It happens when there are 9 year old judges and so many pumpkins to judge.) I would love to give an update here on Annie, but I have been forbidden from sharing any stories about her on my blog. So for the time being, I'm respecting those wishes. Although I can't guarantee this Annie-story moratorium will last long.

Katie won "Cutest" for her witch pumpkin. This past Sunday Katie was doing a church related word search during sacrament meeting. I was truly amazed when she found words like 'clean' and 'white' written backward in the search. Then I noticed she was finding words like 'covenant' and 'worthy' without checking the spelling of them on the words to find list. "Wow. She is really smart" is what I thought. And then I saw she wasn't crossing any of the words off as she was finding them. I pointed this out to her and she acted surprised that there was even a list of words to find. At this point I got suspicious. Katie is a smart girl, but she is only 6 and words like 'accountable' and 'commandments' aren't in her sight word repetoire yet. I then looked more closely at the words to find list and saw an answer key on the bottom of the page. Katie was looking at the answer key and then finding the words to circle by location rather then by the actual words. I leaned over and told this to Eric. He whispered back, "So you went from 'She's brilliant' to 'She's a cheater.' in a matter of seconds." Yeah, pretty much. But like Eric said, at least the optimism of a mother saw the positive first rather than the realism of the hard truth.Here is Suzie with her rendition of the "Cat in the Hat" pumpkin. (Sorry I can't get the picture to turn the right way.) "Cat in the Hat" is her new favorite PBS cartoon. She wouldn't show her face because she was BEING the cat in the hat. Suzie, as Julie pointed out this week, is such a little mother. We went to the cabin this weekend and when we first got there it was cold. So Eric decided to build a fire instead of turning in the heat. As Eric was getting the fire started, Suzie went upstairs to claim her bed and get into her pjs. She came back downstairs about 10 minutes later and stood in front of the barely burning fire with her hands on her hips and asked, "So is this going well?"

She also told her friend, Quinci, that "She (Quinci) shouldn't talk when she (Suzie) is talking." But she also peed outside by a tree at the cabin because she didn't want to take the time to come back inside. So either she is a resourceful little mother or just a resourceful little 3 year old.