D is for Damage....Brain Damage

Bill Cosby once said something along the lines of, if children weren't brain damaged, they'd get in trouble less and have less stressed parents. Actually, it was more like, "But these BRAIN DAMAGED CHILDREN...." are going to be spanked because they pushed one too many buttons.

So brain damage.

We're Halloween people. My hubs and I LOVE Halloween. We don't go as all-out as we'd like to, but we have a lot of fun. This year, Mischief is old enough to dress up and walk around acting cute and Mayhem is old enough to REALLY get into Halloween. He already wore his "Official Candy Inspector" shirt to school...in mid-September. And we've been scoping out all the awesome goodies and practicing trick-or-treating and counting down to October. I am one of Mayhem's two room mothers at school, so of course I'm signed up for the Halloween class party. Mayhem has had his costume picked out and perfected since his birthday (mid-August). I am driving around with Spongebob Halloween decals decorating the back windows of the car. Seriously

So we love Halloween.

For the last two or three weeks we've been discussing Jack-O-Lanterns. What are we going to carve? When are we going to get our pumpkins? They've been at the grocery store already, but we don't want to get them toooooo early and have them crap out before Halloween. We finally got them last week, two big beauties. We also got a carving template set and a battery-powered carving knife. We were SO ready.

So we're ready to carve our Jack-O-Lanters.

It took a few days to make final decisions on which stencils we were going to use on our pumpkins because they were all SO COOL and they had to be perfect. I figured we could carve two designs into each pumpkin...it's round right...lots of blank canvas. Bear in mind though, I have NEVER carved a pumpkin. Ever. But Mayhem was so excited and so sure that everything was going to be perfect that I went for it.

So I'm carving the Jack-O-Lanters.

It took me hours. H-O-U-R-S. But I think they came out pretty damned good if I do say so myself. They were beautiful. I even found some tea candles my cousin had given me that when lit, the flames are purple or green. Awesome!  We took pictures and lit them. It was perfect. Mayhem spun them around to look at all of the designs and told me what a great job I did.

So we go back inside and I ask him, "Do you like your pumpkins, Buddy?"

His response in an utterly baffled voice??

"What pumpkins????"

Brain damage.