It’s been a while since I tried to carve a character in a pumpkin.

It’s been a few years since I even carved a jack-o-lantern at all.

I don’t know. The kids grew out of it, I guess?

We haven't been getting a ton of trick-or-treaters, so I don’t have the motivation.

And I don’t love Halloween in the first place, so it hasn’t taken much for me to lose steam with the pumpkins.

(And, if we’re being honest…I’m not great at the pumpkin carving.)

But this year we were in the store and I saw a good pumpkin and decided to grab it.

And I knew it was a good canvas on which to carve.

So I thought for a minute about what I should carve into it and realized after not a lot of thought since I spend a lot of time thinking about Bluey maybe I should carve a Bluey pumpkin. (More on Bluey next week.)

Thus, this year’s jack-o-lantern.

The top picture is my drawing of the picture I saw online…and then the middle picture is after I carved the lines I drew.

Below is the final result.

I was going for Bluey…it gives me a little bit of the vibe of the ‘Elmo Fire’ meme. (It’s the mouth. I made it thick because I didn't think I would be able to carve any thinner. But my carving tools were amazing this year - I would have been able to do a thinner mouth. It’s tough with pumpkin carving - you only really get one shot. Next time I’ll know - start thinner and go wider if necessary. At least I didn’t ruin the pumpkin. I used to say ‘I’m about to carve a great jack-o-lantern or just ruin a pumpkin.’)

If Halloween’s your thing, I hope you have a happy one.

I will remind you that I used to carve a pumpkin design every year - mostly what my kids wanted but often a mutually agreed upon character. You can click here to the last time I carved a pumpkin, and then from there you can click back to the previous year, and to the previous year from that post, and so on until the thread stops.

OK. Here’s Bluey: