When the word “Halloween” is mentioned all sorts of things come to my mind…witches, ghosts, mummies, Frankenstein, trick or treating and of course, pumpkins! However, when I think of pumpkins, I may envision them as being the “carved” sort, but in reality, that has never been a part of my Halloween festivities because quite honestly, I don’t like all of the work and the mess involved. So up until this year, I’ve been completely content having solid, uncarved pumpkins adorn my front porch as a cute Halloween decoration...and by not carving them, they can still be used as a Thanksgiving decoration too. I’m all about getting my money’s worth! Well, this year that all changed!
For some reason, the little boys decided that they needed to carve a pumpkin for Halloween…and not only one pumpkin, they decided that they each needed to carve their own! I wasn’t too excited about the prospect and I really tried to talk them out of it but at the same time, I purchased the biggest, cheapest pumpkins we could find just in case my “talking” didn’t work.
Getting ready to carve pumpkins
I made the boys wait until the week just before Halloween to do any carving so that the pumpkins wouldn’t get moldy and wilty before Halloween was even here...and by doing that, I really hoped they might forget, but they didn’t! On Friday afternoon they reminded me that Halloween was in only 2 days and if we were going to enjoy the pumpkins and be able to light them, we needed to get them carved.
As much as I didn’t want to carve pumpkins, the boys had won and after much begging, they even talked me into buying the “special carving kit” that promised to be “safer than the normal kitchen knife”. It was also cheaper looking and I didn’t really think it would last longer than this year, so I really had reservations about spending $4 on something cheap like that...but I gave in! Just in case you’re wondering, they really did work better than the kitchen knife, but they also broke just like I thought they would.
Rod was afraid we'd lose a finger cutting the tops off of the pumpkins...so he did it for us!
A pure look of determination...notice the tongue sticking out!
You want me to do what?
I want to be just like my big brother...and stick out my tongue!
With that much concentration, these pumpkins are going to be masterpieces!
I tried to let the boys do as much of the “carving” as possible, but wouldn’t you know it? They hated the seeds and gunk inside the pumpkin worse than I did...so they made me clean the pumpkins out! YUCK! The next step was to draw the faces on the pumpkins and I gladly sat back and let the boys do that…until I saw that they needed “help”, so I convinced them to let me help them just draw the face, but I promised that I’d let them do all of the cutting. That worked out great as well...until the boys started to struggle with the cutting and then I ended up doing most of that too. Who’s project was this anyway?
As it turned out, as much as I complained and would have preferred to avoid this project altogether, by the time we got done with the pumpkins the boys had done a great job, Rod had come out and helped us a little, and we all had had a good time...even me! Maybe we’ll do it again next year...but no promises!
Connor's masterpiece
Hayden's masterpiece
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