Okay, so my plan when I wrote the title of this blog was to write a cute post about my little Halloween decorations. This year, the decorations are some ghosties I made, named Riley and Jonsie, who wear caps from around the house. And then we bought some white pumpkins from Blocks.
What’s Blocks? Well, it’s an amazing place where sometimes you can fill an entire bag with corn on the cob and only pay a dollar. They also have the most enormous array of punkins I’ve ever seen in my life:
Oh, and Blocks isn’t even the Midwest retail chain I was planning to wax poetic about—that’s Menards, and I’ll have to save that for another time because this blog is going to get away from me.
Just like my Halloween decorations did.
So, I painted lil ghostie faces on these white pumpkins and arranged them on the front stoop of the Professor Haus. Along with the colorful fall leaves, it looked real cute and I was super-proud of it.
And then I noticed the scritch scratches on the back of the smallest one.
Now, before I even put the pumpkins outside, I told Mickey, “I have considered the possibility that my squirrel friends might do some chomping on these pumpkin ghosties. I am okay with it. So when it happens, there is no need to panic because I am already fine with the situation.”
When it actually happened, I was delighted.
At first, it was just a few surreptitious scratches that slowly became a little trough in the back of the pumpkin. I couldn’t figure out who the culprit was until I decided to take a look at my doorbell camera.
It took a few scrolls back in the notifications to find the culprit. It is the SFKAMG (Squirrel Formerly Known As Mean Guy). We couldn’t land on a replacement nickname for him when he stopped being mean.
Until now. Now, we call him Peter.
…cause he’s a pumpkin eater.
One day, Mickey suggested I add some red food coloring to the gash on the smol pumpkin’s head, so I did. It caused a very messy aftermath that included cute, bloody animal footprints.
That day, the trough turned into a full-on hole where I could see into the inside of the ghostie pumpkin’s mind, y’all.
And it just kept growing.
I’d catch more than just Peter gnawing on it eventually. The General was taking huge hunks out of it, and the Frosty triplets were around for a while, too.
There is bad news about one of the Frosty triplets, though – one has a chewed-up ear now, and it’s sad. Poor lil bub.
Then, one day, I walked outside, and there were scritch scratches on the back of the medium-sized ghostie pumpkin.
The next time I walked outside, the small pumpkin ghost was off the stoop and in the middle of the walkway.
I did a bit of soul-searching before deciding to leave it there and let nature (the squirrels) take its course. You know, see what they do with it.
They don’t touch the face, that’s for sure.
Sometimes, they’d even turn it around to face me, like they were taunting me.
Yesterday, I thought the tall pumpkin might make it to Halloween unscathed.
And that maybe the medium pumpkin would stay on the porch.
I was wrong on both counts.
Even with all the eatin’ the squirrels have done to my ghosties, I’m still a big fan of our Halloween Decorations at the Professor Haus this year.
Riley and Jonsie are doing all the heavy lifting, though.
Here is a bunch of other photos that I took, but didn’t use in the blog because of space:
