Meet Wilbur and Nicholas

Every year I get excited about carving pumpkins thinking that this will be the year that Nicholas will get into it.  This year we had long discussions about what we were going to carve into our pumpkins.  We read books about pumpkins.  We explained about jack-o-lanterns.  We took him to the store to pick out his own pumpkin.  We got the pumpkin home, washed off, and ready to be carved.  It was then that things begin to fall apart.  There was a big argument about whether Nicholas would get to hold a knife.  You can guess which side his parents were on and which side Nicholas was on.  After a lot of tears, we got that settled.  He resigned himself to only holding the orange scooper, which we told him was the most important part.  What little excitement he had left fizzled out when he discovered what was actually in the pumpkin.  At one point he actually gagged.  There was no way he was putting his arm down in that pumpkin and touching the pumpkin guts.  So we gave up and Joseph did pretty much everything to carve Nicholas' pumpkin.  In the end, Nicholas was only willing to stand by it and name him.  Nicholas is going through a phase where he will name everything Nicholas.  So hence, Nicholas the pumpkin became part of our lives.  After Nicholas was ushered off to bed, Joseph spent the rest of the night carving the spider pumpkin.  He named the spider Wilbur (after the pig in Charlotte's Web) and Nicholas was very excited to meet Wilbur when he woke up the next morning, though he thought Nicholas was a better name for him.