Sick Day!

The other day on Etsy, I stumbled across a thread announcing the 2nd Annual Pumpkin Junkin' Contest. After reading about it, I thought it sounded like something fun that Lil' Kay and I could do together. Well, this morning, Lil' Kay woke up with an extremely swollen right eye and a rash on multiple parts of his body. (I'll save the details for later, because that's a funny story, too.) Anyway, I decided to keep him home from school and take him to the doctor.

After the doctor's appointment, we had to run to the store to pick up his prescription. While we were there, we came up with a plan and gathered supplies for our pumpkin.

At first, Lil' Kay wanted to make the pumpkin into a microraptor. Now, most people may not know what a microraptor is, but basically, it's a feathered dinosaur creature...thing. We put a couple bags of feathers in the cart, and the whole time I'm wondering how the heck we're going to pull this thing off. Fortunately, at the last moment he changed his mind and decided on a T Rex. Before he could unchange his mind, we put the feathers back and bought some green spray paint.

After lunch, we started on the project. We cut the snout, arms, feet and tail out of white posterboard and pinned them to the pumpkin with straight pins. I was totally impressed with Lil' Kay's grasp of placement and dinosaur anatomy. I was going to put the tail at the base of the pumpkin, but he pointed out that it should go up higher, as T Rexes did not drag their tails. He also insisted that the eyes should actually go on the snout and not on the pumpkin like I wanted.

Once the pieces were in place, we went out to the yard and spray painted the entire thing green. Let me tell you, it takes a lot of spraying to cover up an orange pumpkin. Many, many coats.

When the paint was dry, we brought our creature back in the house and added the giant wiggly eyes (is there anything more fun than wiggly eyes?), teeth and tongue. I must say, I'm pretty giddy about the way it turned out. He looks cute and silly and dinosaur-like! Mr. Kay pointed out that it looks like he's about to tell a joke, "Wait! Guys! Tell me if you've heard this one!"