The big news this year, though, was the weather. It was cold and raining for much of the evening. The adjacent field where all the cars were parked was quickly turning into a swamp. We passed at least one car on the way in that had managed to embed itself in a deep pool of mud in the center of the field. Our big worry was that we were going to get rained out or completely drenched while carving. But luck was on our side. The random pumpkin selections had us positioned squarely beneath an old tree which still held most of its foliage. We stayed virtually bone dry the entire time.

We had no idea what we were going to carve this year when we arrived at our pumpkin. So as I set the tools out and unfolded the captain's chair, Michelle paced circles around our designated oversized fruit. I walked over and plucked off the weight certification tag: 265lbs. We tossed around a few ideas before Michelle picked up a small scraper and began etching faint lines into the big exposed face of the pumpkin.

After a brief debate, we decided on a screaming baby's face, a large gaping mouth with one hanging tooth. Michelle grabbed a marker, sketched it out, and we went to work removing pumpking flesh. In the past, we always tried to draw some sort of picture on the front of the pumpkin, working equally from the outside and the inside. This year, we were determined to really use the pumpkin as a three dimensional canvas. The result was most of our carving happened on the outside of the pumpkin, where it can be seen.

In the end, we were quite pleased with the result: A screaming baby with one big tooth. Most of the spectators seemed to get the concept without any hesitation, and most of their small children just wanted to crawl into the huge open mouth and grab a few candles. And even though we did see several of the judges paying close attention to our pumpkin and jotting down notes on their clip boards, we'll have no idea whether we actually won a prize until tomorrow at the earliest.

But that's not the point. The Chadd's Ford Pumpkin Carve is all about having fun while carving an obscenely large pumpkin. And in spite of some threatening weather, I think we managed to do just that this year.