Always buy two pumpkins.

We bought two pumpkins this year.  We bought one very large round one, and one kind of bulbous lumpy one, with what looked like a pumpkin belly button.

OK-- lesson learned--  never buy a pumpkin with a pumpkin belly button, as cute as it may be.  

One afternoon you will be sitting at your table eating lunch, and you will give the pumpkin a shove to make room for your kid's grape juice, and next thing you know, your thumb is inside this rotten pumpkin cavity.  

We weren't planning on carving pumpkins today, but since belly button pumpkin turned into rotting-spot pumpkin, I tell Violet that yes, finally, (because she has been waiting forever) we can have a pumpkin carving afternoon.  

So she gets all excited and puts her apron on and calls in the cat from outside to help, BUT THEN I start to carve the top off and suddenly the entire pumpkin is caving in on itself in one big black rotting mess, spraying me with pumpkin bile. 

   

I have never seen anything like it.  It was rotting from the inside out.  The entire thing, just a black moldy seedy mess.  So I put it outside.  

But V was so excited to carve a pumpkin.... so we had to have round two with our second pumpkin that I wasn't planning on carving until closer to Halloween (thankfully we had another one!  I felt so bad for her; Why is our pumpkin rotten, mommy??  Why do we have to throw it away??)  

Thankfully, perfect pumpkin number two had no rotting belly button, and supplied us with more than enough pumpkin carving fun.

Violet's cousin, Rose, sent us this detailed illustration of how to turn your pumpkin into a cat which obviously we were thrilled about.  Chowder helped.  

Pictures!  (none of pumpkin 1; sorry)