It's NOT the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

At some point, I will have the energy to explain the hours and hours of time I spent working on the auction for Ben's preschool--- time I could have spent blogging, or, I don't know, sleeping... but the event was last night and I'm still not ready to talk about it. The good news is that it's over and I should have time to have a life (and update the blog) on a regular basis.

The week of Halloween, Ben suddenly became obsessed with the idea of making a pumpkin pie. A few things you should know:

1) I HATE pumpkin. (Yes, word police, I said, "HATE".)

2) While I love to cook, I'm not a huge pie baker.

3) If you don't have kids, you might not know that when you have kids, you'll do crazy things for them--- pick their noses and wipe it on your jeans, smell their butts in public to see if they've pooped, and even bake a pumpkin pie.

Here's how it happened:
B: What we do with those punt-kins, Mama?
H: They're for Halloween. We'll make jack-o-lanterns.
B: (horrified look) NO! We can't cut them. The best thing to do with a punt-kin is make punt-kin pie.

H: But we get to make cool faces on the pumpkins for the trick-or-treaters.

B: NO! We can't. It will hurt them. We need to make a punt-kin pie.
H: Honey, I don't even know how to make a pumpkin pie.
B: You don't? Daddy does. I do, too.
H: Really? How do you do it?
B: (with lots of flailing and hand gestures) First you take a punt-kin and scoop out all the yucky stuff. Then you bake it in the hot, hot oven. Then you mix the punt-kin with other stuff and put it in the pie. Then it's punt-kin pie.

H: Well, maybe I can find a recipe for pumpkin pie and we can make one.

While he was away from me over the next two days, he asked everyone he knew if they knew how to make pumpkin pie. Then he'd ask them to give his poor, stupid mother a recipe since she clearly didn't know what she was doing.

Finally, after endless badgering and punt-kin pie discussion, last Friday, I gave in. For 3+ hours we messed around with crust, blind-baking crust, mixing the pumpkin junk, and getting everything ready. We baked it, we cooled it, and all the while had a never-ending dialogue about punt-kin pie.

After dinner, it was finally time. We could eat our punt-kin pie. He was so excited he could hardly stand it. We carefully cut a piece of pie, added the requisite amount of whipped topping, and it was finally, FINALLY time to eat.

What happened next was one of those "crossroads" moments. You know, where you arrive at a fork in the road (in the pie, maybe) and you can choose to go one way or the other. Ben took a bite of the pie...

and said, "Ewwwwwww. Yuck." He spit the bite on his plate, ate the Cool Whip and said, "I don't like punt-kin pie. It's gross."

That crossroads moment? It was more mine than his and it was two-fold. My first thought was, "You've got to be kidding. We just spent a whole afternoon doing this and now you don't like it?" My second thought... "Sweet. This kid DID get at least a few of my genes after all."