My Punkins and Their Pumpkins....

We made our annual pilgrimage to the Pumpkin Patch this week. I chose to take them after school was over so all the field trip groups were gone and it would be less busy than on the weekend.

It was the perfect day, no crowd, cool temperatures, and tons of fun.

We rode the hay ride out to the pumpkin patch to pick our pumpkins and our boys chose some "unique" specimens.

Now when I was a kid, we had one pumpkin and it was perfect. It was usually pretty large and always perfectly round with no damage on the outside. Then my brother would carve it on Halloween and mom would put a candle inside of it. It was the classic Halloween scene.

Well, our boys didn't pick perfect pumpkins. They were far from perfect.  They were more like pumpkins that would have been characters in the movie "The Breakfast Club" or pumpkins that would have been found on the Island of Misfits in the movie "Rudolph The Red Nose Reindeer".

Braden found his first one immediately and he fell in love. It was a "bumpy pumpkin". (they are his favorite kind)

Those bumpy pumpkins are so ugly and this one was lopsided but he loved it so I picked it up and the backside was all scarred up and dented.

I showed the bad side to him but he still loved it. I was about to talk him out of it by telling him that it was yucky and ugly when I stopped myself short because I realized something more important than that dented and scarred ugly pumpkin.

That pumpkin is a lot like Braden. He is perfect and beautiful but when you take his shirt off you see  many scars from 8 years of cancer treatments, multiple surgeries, 4 central lines, bone marrow aspirates, stem cell harvests, and tattoos which were markers from his radiation treatments. 

Those scars tell Braden's story. 

And apparently this pumpkin has a story too.

So we brought it home because it is perfectly imperfect. The fact that he loved it regardless of it's lack of perfection nearly had me in tears.  

There is nothing more beautiful than acceptance and I love his pure and kind heart that looks past imperfections to see beauty.

His second pumpkin, yes I told him only one pumpkin and then I totally caved, was one that he said looked just like a jack o'lantern pumpkin. The problem is that the top was split open a little bit.

I opened my mouth to tell him that it wouldn't last very long and would get yucky soon and we would have to throw it away, but then I stopped.

Again, this is like Braden's story. The doctors have told us more times than we can count that he wasn't going to live and we needed to spend our time well. We chose to fight and to make memories with the time that we were given.

So we have one pumpkin that isn't going to last as long but until then, it's going to be on the front porch with the others proudly displayed.

We walked back through the patch to find Zach. He's a 7th grader and apparently there is an unwritten law that says that you cannot be seen with your mother and little brother in a pumpkin patch so he was far.....far away searching for his pumpkin.

I had not been given the memo about pumpkin patch etiquette prior to the pumpkin patch visit. (I would have still made him come with us though) ;) 

Something about it totally throwing off his street cred??

We found Zach, with the hood of his jacket covering his face so no one would recognize him.

He had two small pumpkins in his hands.

 Yes, once again I said only one pumpkin and then I totally caved. But I was really excited because they looked pretty perfect to me.

I caved because he explained that he found each of them hidden under large pumpkin leaves where no one could find them. He said they wouldn't be seen and no one would choose them so he wanted to bring them home because they should be noticed.

I melted. 

And nearly cried again.

These pumpkins are just like Zach.  Quietly hidden away hoping to be noticed for how special he really is. He's never vocal about it but being the sibling of a kid with cancer is a tough row to hoe. Nearly all the attention is on the child with cancer because you are fighting to save his life. 

It's not fair and we do try to even it out and our friends help try to even it out, but it's the truth. Zach has been hidden just like these pumpkins.

I love this boy's heart and compassion. That's my favorite thing about him.

I thought we had all the orange things we needed but at the checkout stand, Zach found a gourd and wanted to get a small one because he said it was tradition. 

I do not recall this tradition.

We bought the gourd.

That makes 5 pumpkins...when we went for one.

I'm weak.

When we put it on the porch, Zach set it on top of one of his smaller pumpkins because he said it was small so it needed a little perch so it would feel special.

Once again, I teared up.

Zach is not tall. He often gets made fun of because he's one of the shorter kids in his grade level. 

I wish I could change that, I wish people could just be kind about sizes of others. 

And I wish we could all be a little kinder to ourselves about our own sizes too. 

So our "Breakfast Club"/ "Island of Misfits" pumpkins were specially chosen by my punkins and they  have meaning.

None is perfect, each has its own issues and imperfections...

In their simplest of terms they are:

bumpy...

scarred...

broken....

overlooked...

and judged by size...

But, as they said in the Breakfast Club, aren't we all just a little bit of each of those things as well?

What if we could all accept our own imperfections and the imperfections of others as easily as my guys did with these silly pumpkins...

Now that would be perfect.