Thanks A Lot Miss Nebraska, or Carving Pumpkins

On Monday we went to Longfellow, the kids school, to help the kids carve pumpkins. The zoo was recently privatized (made crappy) and they needed volunteers to carve pumpkins. One of the banks in town donated the pumpkins and some people from the community came to help the kids carve. WNCC our community college sent over some softball players, the bank let some of the personnel come, lots of parents helped out, and of course our native Scottbluffonian(?) Miss Nebraska. I didn't realize she was coming until she pulled up a seat at Ella's table to help some of her classmates. She is a wonderful woman, I thought she was very sweet and patient with the kids, but I was a little bummed out that all the pictures Ella's teacher took of us had both me and Miss Nebraska in them. Yeah for her. Booooooo for me. Like I need pictures with this tiny, skinny, blond bombshell in them. Miss Nebraska is the pretty blond in the background, fyi. It's just that easy to feel self-esteem bleed from your system!
Anyways, we had fun, the kids did a great job. Eric and I were both in the 2nd grade to help, and we were so busy trying to convince the boys they didn't need the "extremely hard" stencils of mummies and flames that we weren't really paying attention to what Livi was doing.
We went the next night to look for the pumpkins they had carved. Ella put a giant "E" on the back of hers so we could find it (plus it was the only one I saw with eyelashes!)and Ethan carved a question mark on the top of his. Ella's was right at the beginning of the zoo and super easy to spot, but we never found Ethan's. I can only guess that it was tipped over, or the light was shorted where it was. I like to think it was in the throng of pumpkins below: Poor guy, but at least we got a picture before we sent it!