3 haikus for cleo

 

we have a caique

acrobatic and funny

cleo is her name

sometimes she bites hard

it's a little less than cool

she makes us laugh too

we've had her one year

she waddles like a penguin

kisses are her speech

pumpkin guts make me feel festive

Nothing says Halloween like carving pumpkins. Put a couple of humorous or creepy faces onto the front of a lovely orange gourd and you've got instant Halloween happiness in your home. Now, my mom was good at keeping holiday traditions and crafts alive when I was a kid so to me, this kind of thing is just necessary, but I recently discovered that my beloved fiancé had never (or at least that he remembered) carved a jack-o-lantern in his life. After I picked my jaw up from the floor, I set about quickly remedying this tragic event.

Along with my future mother-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and niece, we traveled to the best pumpkin patch/fall festival that I could find. It was full of corn mazes, hay rides, pig races, and pumpkins galore. Jackpot. We took part in a few of the festivities (pig races are pretty ridiculous) before Sash and I took a careful amount of time picking out our victims...I mean, pumpkins.

Since this was his first time, I wanted him to select whatever pumpkin called his name and there were TONS. We were on a huge farm so there were fields of all different types. I told him to imagine the face he wanted when he looked at the choices. Really feel which one called his name.

I take my holidays seriously people.

He selected a mid-size, tall pumpkin, which to me screamed NOVICE. All I could see by looking at that oblong shape was that his arm was going to have to go in up to his elbow. No thanks, but perfect for him. It was his first experience with it after all. ;) I took a bit longer because I'm quite picky about this. I wanted a squat little guy with a nice stem.

Uhh...

Wow, that sounds rather suggestive, but get your mind out of the gutter because I found exactly that.

A couple of days later Sash and I literally took a stab. With our new pumpkin carving tools in hand and the table covered in plastic we were ready to get squash-tacular.

 

  

 

And all of this serious concentration eventually culminated into this:

And yes, our pumpkins did sport a goatee and a 'stache. New holiday traditions are sometimes just as fun as the old ones. :)