The Great Carrot

Micah started getting amped up for Halloween, oh...maybe the second week in September.  Yeah.  He decided to make Halloween "decorations" - a.k.a. strips of paper with purple and orange scribbles on them - and taping them all over the house.  This tickled his grandpa.*

My mom has this awesome table in her entryway that gets decorated for each holiday.  Cutest table ever.  And the grandkids love it.  Micah knew that Grandma had some sa-weet decorations, just itching to get put on that table, but she told him he had to wait until October 1st.  He counted down the days.  He kept asking how long before they could "decowate."  Finally, on October 1st, he woke her up at 7 a.m. and said, "Time to get up and decowate, Gwamma!!"  She grudgingly got out of bed and obliged.  Such an angel my mother is.

A few days later, my mom was pulling out the last of her garden carrots, cleaning them up, pulling the little carrot hairs off of them, etc.  Micah had been bugging and bugging us to carve pumpkins, but we kept telling him that they would be all gross and moldy by Halloween if we carved them now.  He was really upset.  And persistent.  Who, Micah?  Persistent???

Finally, he asked, "Gwamma, can I just decowate a cawwot?"

I interjected.  "Look, babe, you can draw on a carrot with a marker, but we're not going to attempt to gut it and carve it.  There's no way."

He reluctantly agreed to the terms.  So he drew on his carrot.

Then he got another "wild hair," as my dad likes to call it.

He was going to hang this carrot up in our living room.  From the vaulted ceilings.  And it was going to stay there until Halloween.

We were squarely against this idea.  And he was pissed.  "But Aunt Beads hanged lanterns from the ceiwing for her baby shower..." he complained.

"Mike," I said, "Lanterns don't rot.  Or attract fruit flies.  And the lanterns were up for one day.  Not a whole month."

We fought back and forth for a few hours about this stupid carrot being hung from the ceiling.  Finally, my mom thought of a good idea.  She had an old salsa jar and said, "What if we decorate this jar, and then put the carrot in the jar for decoration??"

He seemed okay with this idea.  So I pulled out what little Halloween stickers I had, and Micah found some old Thanksgiving stickers I also had on hand.  He decorated the salsa jar and happily plopped the carrot back in.

Unfortunately, I don't have photographic evidence of his carrot.  It disappeared a few hours later when Micah decided the jar could be his money jar.  I keep asking him where the carrot is, and he has no clue.  So I guess if we start getting fruit flies in some room, that's where the carrot is stowed.  I've combed our bedroom multiple times, looking for it.  Here's how his old carrot jar looks now, with his tooth fairy money and his allowance for helping Grandpa prune the bushes:

He's already asking about decorating for Thanksgiving.  I keep telling him to ask his Gwamma.  Poor woman.  And you KNOW he's going to be pushing her to get the Christmas decorations up the day after Thanksgiving and not one day later.

We've got a little home-decorating guru on our hands.  A persisent one.  The kid kills me.

*Grandpa hated it.