So Ellie won a pumpkin carving contest this week.

This week was like any other. I was scheduled to chaperone a few school field trips, (seventeen I think?) all of them full-day extravaganzas (one including a day on a river with mini fishing nets dredging for treasures including things like leeches and not things like hot, steeped tea with two milk). The all-day trips are the best because it’s when you realize how quickly you would vote yourself off the island if you had to go longer than 2 hours without a snack and a hot beverage.

Ellie didn’t actually “win” anything which kind of goes against my “You’re all winners!” mantra at the cross country meet (also this week) where I lost my wedding band but then paid my 13 year old in the way of promising her the afternoon off school if she came with me to the community centre with a metal detector to search the property. Ten minutes of totally normal people swinging a gadget back and forth along the grass and she found it! We celebrated with a trip to Bulk Barn where she was given permission to choose ANY treat in the store. She picked a bag of ground chick pea flour. That’s my girl.

Do I sound frazzled?

Pumpkin.

Ellie’s friend entered a Star Wars themed pumpkin decorating contest because neither of the girls have seen the movie and her drawing was selected to be entered in a contest at the local mall where Star Wars fans or “Trekkies” their more formal call (I don’t know, I haven’t seen it) get to vote for their favourite fruity depiction of Yoda and then the pumpkins are handed out to homeless people to use for kindling, or something like that.

So as the “victors” of this contest, Ellie scored herself a trip to her friend’s house to decorate something called bb8 or bbc or Vitamin B 12 and then I got to drive her to school carrying this thing to her classroom before it would go on display for all the world to see (between regular, mall hours, Saturday and Sunday only).

The day of the decorating created a small hiccup for both families involved for a few reasons.

Adding anything to our schedules over and above what we are already doing just doesn’t work. We are all too busy, hanging on by a thread, haven’t eaten solids in days, driving kids to activities, trying to reasonably answer without freaking out when Chloe asks, “How do you say, ‘no week’” so you respond ‘no week’ and she angrily replies, “No! How do you say ‘no weak’?” and you carefully say “know week?” and she says, “know weak, wait new weak” and then you get tired of being yelled at for repeating exactly what she is asking until she yells “UNIQUE!” and you pull over because the paper bag you’ve been breathing into has a hole in it.

Trying to coordinate this extra, extracurricular took some master planning, a degree in logistics and a re-stock of Wheat Thins crackers in the glove box. At one point, I think we agreed to pull the kids out of school at noon because that was our only window of free time. There’s something wrong with a plan that views the learning hours as “free time” but 1am-2am didn’t seem right either.

Pumpkin success! The pumpkin is now on display until of course it rots from the inside out and melts into mush before the contest closes. If that’s how BB8 dies in Star Wars imagine what the girls could win?

But it’s not a slam dunk. The competition is grueling. There are entries from; The Pumpkin Carvers Guild of North America (Ontario branch), some local fire fighters and James Earl Jones and Carrie Fisher have collaborated on something pretty awesome.

Fingers crossed for the chance to move onto the next round: paper mache a character from Frozen.

p.s. Hanna chose a Kit-Kat bar from Bulk Barn in case that had you stumped.