This May Be Our Last Year Carving Pumpkins

I love Halloween. I love the costumes and the excitement. I love the decorations and the costumes. I love the parties and the trick or treating. And of course, I adore carving pumpkins.

I have carved pumpkins almost every year I can remember, and that includes long before children, long before my husband. I remember giggling with a friend shortly after college when we gave our pumpkins bubble baths in the bathtub before carving them - just to be silly. I remember finding those way cool toys that are essentially miniature hacksaws that let you create your pumpkin with so much more detail than my giant knives ever could.

We've made pumpkin carving with the wee ones a tradition. They get pumpkins every year, and we clean them and carve them and roast the pumpkin seeds. When the wee ones were little little, my husband and I did all the work ourselves. As they've gotten a little older, we've expected a little more from them. They can help empty the pumpkins of seeds. They can decide on the design of the pumpkins, and this year we put Mister Man in charge of helping to poke the design into his pumpkin.

We made a mistake a few years ago, however. My husband discovered he could make extra cool pumpkins with patterns the same year we discovered those awesome tools. It's possible that they're packaged together and thus the discovery was made at the same time. The wee ones absolutely adore the very cool patterns, and now they want their pumpkins to have those same cool patterns. Yep, the patterns that take my husband forever to do instead of the fun freehand scary faces that I can make in fifteen or so minutes.

This year, as we prepared our pumpkins for the first cut, Little Miss announced that she wasn't going to clean out her pumpkin because it made her itchy. Mister Man started to clean his out but gagged and had to hold his breath every time he went near his pumpkin. My husband and I ended up cleaning out the pumpkins.

Mister Man was put in charge of poking holes into the pumpkin for his pattern. Twenty-three holes and less than five percent done, he decided he was tired and needed a break. He wandered off into the homework room, picked up a book, and we couldn't entice him to rejoin us.

Little Miss drew a traditional face on her pumpkin for my dad to carve - yay, no patterns - but she used a Sharpie. Did you know Sharpies don't come off pumpkins? It's an interesting look. She oversaw the majority of the carving after having overseen the cleaning of the pumpkin. Then she was done, too, and she disappeared until after it was time to put our pumpkins outside for display.

I'm thinking next year they don't get pumpkins. I think next year I get a pumpkin and my husband gets a pumpkin. And we carve them at night after the wee ones are in bed. It's the end product they love anyway because how awesome do pumpkins look as they glow in the night?

Ewww Pumpkin Guts!

I love so many things about Fall. I love the crisp weather (so long as it's sunny, with a mild breeze and about 72 degrees) and the leaves changing colors. I love making leaf piles and jumping in them, and oh the smell of them burning! Plus there's football and Halloween and all sorts of great stuff.

Today was our official pumpkin carving day, and it was quite entertaining. I have a small pie pumpkin from the field trip I chaperoned with Mister Man. He has a similar tiny pumpkin (whoo hoo - a tiny pumpkin and a single apple for $18.50!), and Little Miss had a slightly larger pumpkin from her field trip. That simply won't do. Fortunately, Aldi had gigantic pumpkins for $1.99, so the wee ones each chose one to bring home.

The first order of business was to dry them off from the soaking they've gotten over the past day - and yes, we need the rain. My husband was in charge of finding our pumpkin carving kit. He told me that it wasn't in the Halloween bin where it belonged, which saddened me. If it isn't there, it is gone. He insisted it might be in a drawer in the kitchen and proceeded to rummage through a few despite my repeated insistence that I use the drawers often enough and keep them clean enough that they aren't there. And that something like the pumpkin carving kit doesn't just "appear" in a drawer.

He came back upstairs a few minutes later hiding a bad that contained the pumpkin carving kit. That he found in the Halloween bin. Where it belongs. Ahem.

Our kit also includes the oh so cool patterns that make for a truly awesome looking pumpkin. The wee ones each chose a design for their large pumpkins. I ignored the designs and simply began hollowing out my pumpkin for my freehand carving. I'm just fine with my just-the-same-every-year pumpkin with eyes, nose, mouth with teeth, ears, and eyebrows. And you know what? Carving a pie pumpkin is a whole lot easier to do than my usual big one.

After my husband transferred the patterns, I cut off the tops of the wee ones pumpkins. After explaining to Mister Man that either he cleaned out the inside of his pumpkin or it didn't get carved, he put aside his sensory issues and gingerly began removing the guts. (And yes, I know he has sensory issues. I know it's not easy for him, but I also know what he can do and that he needs to be pushed to realize that many things aren't as bad as he thinks they are in his mind.)

Little Miss had no such issues with her pumpkin.

While he didn't exactly enjoy cleaning out his pumpkin, he did a pretty good job of it. Once he finished, he decided he wanted my husband to do the carving of the design so it would look better rather thna doing it himself (probably a good call considering how long it took my husband to do the carving).

Instead, we began work on his little pumpkin, which he decided he also wished to carve. The top again came off, and he proceeded to clean it. This one, I made him carve himself, reinforcing that this was for fun and that he should just have fun with it because pumpkins aren't supposed to be perfect anyway.

That went well for awhile until he accidentally broke the mini-saw he's using (it works on pumpkins but it isn't sharp enough to break skin if you run it against your hand - and I was standing a foot away watching carefully). After replacing the broken saw with another one we had - yay for cheap carving kits! - he continued carving with a little help from me since he wanted to do lots of curves.

He quickly completed his and waited patiently for my husband to finish carving the big, special pumpkin. The look on Mister Man's face when he finally saw the completed product was priceless. He loved his pumpkin - and my husband insists it was worth his time (and the lack of the wee ones' involvement) for that reason alone.

Little Miss also has a very cool pumpkin carved, but by 1:20 I could see that she was fading and getting unusually crabby. I sent her upstairs for a nap, and she is currently sound asleep. If she wakes up soon, I'll add pictures of her with her pumpkin, too.



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