Pumpkin Carving 2010

It's that time of year again, time for wool sweaters and pumpkin carving. Like the previous two years, my friend Andrés hooked us up with a lovely gourd specimen to carve. Nora had a lot of fun with the pumpkin this year. We invited over our four-year-old neighbor, Oscar (who happens to be Andrés' nephew), to participate in the autumnal festivities. I did get Oscar to put his hand into the pumpkin and feel the slimy innards once, but after that he preferred to play with Nora's toys, which were all new to him, and watch from afar. He brought over his own little pumpkin to carve too, so Marga got her first carving experience, which she thoroughly enjoyed. Before it was time to start carving, I did some rough sketches to choose a look for my pumpkin this year. After I drew the first one, it looked a little familiar, so I pulled up the blog entry from last year, and doggone if it wasn't the same exact design as last year. I had to break out of my angry-two-teeth artistic phase and tread on some new ground. I ended up choosing a favorite design of my mother's, the shifty-eyed jack-o-lantern.

Lobotomy patient.

Definitely not who you want performing your lobotomy.

The look on Marga's face here is absolutely perfect!

I went with the happy shifty-eye for 2010.

Marga's jack-o-lantern was much more sinister.

Oscar acting scared of his pumpkin.

He preferred playing with the finished product more than the actual cleaning and carving. His face was banged up from a fíºtbol match the day before.

I got a pretty good series of shots of Oscar and Nora playing with the pumpkins.

Nora doing her jack-o-lantern face.

While clearly fascinated by Oscar, Nora didn't really want to spend any time alone with him. He's had good practice with his one-month-old sister and was very tender with Nora.

Grumpy and Smily.

The Gourdhead Brothers.

The cool halo shot I discovered last year.

This year I had the idea to use my LED flashlight to do some Tinkerbell lighting.

This is just a 20 second exposure with me moving my LED around inside the pumpkin with my hand.

This might be my favorite one.

I love the symmetry of this photo, with the three heads and the three orange orbs.

We had a wonderful evening. It was great to have our neighbor over for a couple hours.

Happy Halloween!!