How to Make the Perfect Pirate Jack-O’-Lantern

As you all know, I’m huge into arts and crafts. They are, basically, my raison d’etre. So, I figure it’s about time that I give a little gift to the world and share some of my crafty knowledge. 

I don’t use Pinterest, because frankly, I don’t need to; I have all the arts and crafts ideas I will ever need stored between my ears. But, I know many of less crafty among us need that kind of help, so feel free to Pin this. Be prepared for it to go viral.

Nothing can quite compare to the pressure of jack-o’-lantern carving. Every year when the calendar flips to October, you can just sense the tension building. The air becomes cooler and drier, leaves rustle in the breeze, and people start freaking out about pumpkin carving. Just take a stroll around the grocery store and look into people’s faces. They try to act normal, but you can see it in their eyes. The nagging question that keeps them up every night: “What am I going to do with this freakin’ pumpkin?”

You feel like you’ve done it all: triangle eyes, square eyes, circle nose (tragically, never again), a mouth with a couple teeth, everything. You feel like you’ve exhausted all your options. But, have you made a pirate jack-o’-lantern? No, you haven’t, but you are about to.

What Did We Learn This Week? My 3-Year-Old Is Better at Parenting Than I Am

Just when I thought I had it all figured out and was really starting to hit my parenting groove, boom, my mom tells me a story about how my 3-year-old developed a new parenting strategy to employ if you ever find yourself in the unenviable position of being in a store with your kids.

My mom had to pick up some paperwork at the hospital the other day and Jacob went with her. They stopped off in the hospital gift shop, which is basically a cross between Toys R’ Us and paradise as far as 3-year-olds are concerned. But apparently, instead of demanding that my mom buy him something from the array of irresistible stuffed chipmunks, flower pens, and novelty candies, he picked up items, inspected them, made a mental list of things he might like to buy next time, and put them back. No tears, no begging, not even a polite request. 

My mom thought that making a list of things he might like to buy next time was a particularly brilliant parenting maneuver that we had developed. Unfortunately, I had to confess that no, we weren’t that good, he made that up on his own. 

Come on! I’ve been writing all this stuff down for like a year and I haven’t delivered even one fully-formed parenting strategy? And yet, my 3-year-old has already developed a really good one? Sure, you love it when your kids succeed and do better than you and blah blah blah, but….come on!

Anyway, I don’t really like giving advice because it feels a little pretentious. But, passing along parenting tactics devised by my 3-year-old feels pretty okay. So, test this one out. Let me know if the old “think of things you’d like to buy next time” strategy works for you. If it doesn’t, just blame Jacob, it was all his idea.

Self-Inflicted Parenting Wounds

Long, uninterrupted periods of time in which your only meaningful human contact is with miniature persons that sometimes seem like bipolar wind-up toys can do weird things to your brain. As a person who tends to operate on a relatively even emotional keel, rarely deviating too far from a comfortable indifference except, perhaps, when sports are on TV, the kind of intensity that small children throw at you every waking second of every day is, well, rather intense. 

Sure, the negative emotion is obviously challenging, but even the unbridled happiness and eagerness is draining. I mean, it’s like Paul Rudd’s character says to Seth Rogen’s character in Knocked Up (I think), I sometimes wish I liked anything as much as my kids like bubbles.