The Emma Memorial Pumpkin

Our babysitter is having surgery this week and so August has taken the afternoons off of work to watch Edward. Late this afternoon he called me at work to tell me that he was working on a jack-o-lantern that would put his pumpkin carving portrait of Red Rocket "to shame." When I arrived home he ushered me into our bedroom (the darkest room in the house) and there was a pumpkin portrait of Emma in all her splendor copied from one of my favorite photographs of her. It took him four hours to create the stencil and execute the carving. Parts of the collar flowers were carved with toothpicks. I was speechless. I immediately photographed it for the blog.

Tuesday is August's bowling league night so we needed to go out as soon as I got home to grab some dinner. He extinguished the candle in the Emma pumpkin and placed it up on the table and we went to dinner. When we returned home and I walked into the kitchen to put our leftovers in the fridge and looked over at the table........ Red Rocket had eaten the entire bottom portion of the pumpkin and was laying in a "beached whale" posture with a massively bloated belly on the dining room floor. I have never experienced the emotions I felt at that moment. I laughed and cried all at the same time. (I was able to laugh since I am well versed in the 'foods that are toxic to dogs' list and thankfully pumpkin is NOT one of those foods.)

August, however, was not so amused. Being the "problem solving" personality that he is, he headed straight for the garbage bin where he fished out the pumpkin scraps and began a reconstructive operation on Emma's portrait using toothpicks to interconnect sections of pumpkin. I took Red Rocket and left the premises seeking refuge at Niki and Randy's house (our neighbors). Niki offered a canine psychoanalysis by diagnosing Rocket with an acute case of jealousy, after all, he didn't eat the pumpkin with his own portrait on it which has been in the house for three days. After 20 minutes we returned to discovered that August had completed a pretty decent patch job. I doubt that in the dark anyone would notice the flaws although he is concerned that as the pumpkin shrinks and shrivels over the next several days that the patch job won't hold up until Halloween. I guess we'll see.

I tried to make August look on the bright side. I said, "Just think, this will make a GREAT post on the blog." He looked at me with a deadpan expression and said, "You can start off the blog entry with a message from Red Rocket saying, 'This is my last post...'"

Well, life number seven gone - six more to go!