Pumpkin Carving

When you live in California, you have to time your carving with the actual day of Halloween.  If you carve your pumpkins just a day too early, you will end up with pumpkin soup on your front porch.  I, of course, learned this the hard way.  In Washington- you can carve your pumpkins weeks in advance.  The crisp, cool weather preserves the carving where as the hot heat melts the pumpkin down here.  I guess the old saying, 'You live and you learn' applies here.

Tonight we carved pumpkins and it was fun to see how into the process the kids got!  Now that they are all older, the standard triangle eyes, nose and jagged mouth pumpkin just isn't good enough.  Instead, all four kids wanted to carve a pumpkin from a stencil in the carving book.  In theory, I was excited they all stepped it up a notch.  In reality, that meant I had to do a lot more work and save them when they made a disastrous cut!

Emily and Matthew loathed cleaning out their pumpkins.  I made them do it for the most part because I knew they could.  If they need sensory therapy when they are older- I will gladly pay the bill.  We had such a fun night.  What was supposed to be a thirty minute activity turned into an hour and twenty minute extravaganza. Although the kids were tired when we were done, they were more than proud of their amazing creations.  In the words of Michael when he was about five years old, "The pumpkins looked smooty ootie ootie!"