This is, I believe, directly correlated with the event of my brother and his girlfriend (very kindly) babysitting on Friday night, so that my husband and I could go out to dinner to celebrate his birthday. “I’m so excited!” I said to my yoga teacher Friday morning, “We have a date! We only have about five dates a year.” She smiled at me, somewhat sympathetically. Now that I think about it, five might be a slight over-estimate. Anyway, we had a lovely dinner and the boys enjoyed their uncle and aunt and now we have a Jack-o-Lantern named Chachi.

It snowed big, fat flakes Saturday morning so my plans to take the boys to a local market were quashed – I have a thing about not driving in snowstorms unless it is really necessary – so instead we decided to carve our pumpkins. Here’s me and the boys digging out the innards:

Okay, so it’s just me digging out the innards. Here are the finished products:

Chachi is the one on the left.

Later we made snowmen and I really should have taken a picture, as some sort of avant-garde photographic portrait. We decorated the snowman with random items in our backyard, and after I went inside to warm up I saw Mr. Snowman meeting his maker, as it were. Fortunately the boys were not urinating on him, no; instead they were merely kicking him down and laughing hysterically, a somewhat disturbing scenario. Soon all that was left was a pile of snow, a plastic fireman’s hat, and two water guns.