Morning all,

Herring Gull Harry and I have just come back from market carrying a huge pumpkin. We had this brilliant idea of scooping out the inside of the pumpkin and putting a lantern inside instead, carving out two eyes and a scary mouth and putting it on the window sill to scare passers by at Halloween.

I thought buying the pumpkin would be the easy bit of this operation but no. As we discovered today, buying the pumpkin is more difficult that it looks!

Let me explain. Herring Gull Harry and I went to the pumpkin shop and decided the pumpkins on the shelves looking at us were too small for what we wanted. Overhearing our conversation, the shopkeeper pointed us in the direction of a large bin just outside the shop by the door and said there were pumpkins of all shapes and sizes there – and he was right. We went through them but none of them seemed quite right and just as we were thinking that we would not find our pumpkin – there – at the bottom of the bin was the PERFECT pumpkin.

We were so excited, froglettes, as I leant over the bin to lift the pumpkin out. I tried and I tried but my arms were just not long enough to reach it. Herring Gull Harry then had the brilliant brainwave of hopping into the bin and lifting the pumpkin to me but after two attempts the pumpkin proved too heavy for him to move so I hopped in to help him but the bin was too high for us to successfully get the pumpkin out. This pumpkin was proving to be a problem that we had not anticipated!

We hopped out of the bin and just as I was thinking up master plan no. 3 the shopkeeper bellowed, “you frogs having trouble out there?”

“Um, not exactly,” I replied unwilling to concede defeat to a pumpkin.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Herring Gull Harry.

“Ssshhhh, just thinking,” I said.

The shopkeeper appeared and went to the troublesome bin and tilted it towards him, leant inside and lifted out the pumpkin, our PERFECT pumpkin. “Here, you are,” he said giving us the pumpkin.

“Thank you,” we said together as we carried the pumpkin carefully and put it in our cart to take home.

“That bin is a bit tricky, you’re not the only ones to have trouble getting pumpkins out of it.”

“So why do you use it?” asked Herring Gull Harry.

“Because it ‘s a good way of stopping thieves stealing them,” he replied.

So here we are back at home, froglettes, with our PERFECT pumpkin about to make a scary face!

Spooky – or what!!!

E