Pumpkin Carving

Who knew that it would take four adults and a teen 3 hours to carve four pumpkins?

Garren, Gracie and I had a wonderful afternoon with our neighbors Tom, Colette & Mallory. Garren had a story to do on pumpkin carving, so he picked up four huge pumpkins from Walmart on Thursday night when we got our groceries. Knowing that it would be a lot of work and tons of fun I invited our unsuspecting neighbors over for lunch and some family pumpkin fun.

I made chili, corn bread, and of course we had the apple pies. Those were the payoffs for these poor people who would get themselves covered in pumpkin guts!

Really though, we had a marvelous time. Garren had bought a kit that had stencils and several tools to carve said pumpkins, and I had already printed off a Dora The Explorer kit from Nick Jr. for Gracie.

After we ate lunch, we dove right in and started serving up the pumpkin insides. While many of you are likely familiar with the goopy part of the gourd, 13 year old Mallory had never used her hands to get the goop out...she usually used her father. Since Tom was already gutting his own creation, Mallory was a trooper and dove right in (you'll have to see the pictures, they are hilarious!). Gracie wasn't exactly a fan of helping to carve the pumpkins. She kind of stood back and watched and entertained us all with a variety of toys, music and banter.

Now usually the hard part is getting the pumpkin insides out, but since we had never tried to make anything more than a jack-o-lantern triangle eyes and nose and crooked mouth, we had no idea what we were in for.

The kit that Garren got had stencils and step by step instructions, so I taped the first stencil to the first pumpkin and started punching the holes. I had no idea how much work it would take--or how awesome they would turn out. I made a cute face with a winking eye, Mallory did a scared face, Tom did an exhausting and very intricate raccoon inside a jack-o-lantern, and then I did the Dora one for Gracie. Garren was in charge of cutting out the winky face I had already traced, and then helping to make the holes the rest of cut bigger, and I am not exactly sure how Colette got out of carving duty--but she didn't look very upset about it ;)

I have to tell you, doing the stencils while a lot more work, is really the way to go. Please check out the pictures so you can see all of our hard work, and you will also see how much fun our families had sharing a holiday experience. Maybe we will make it an annual thing, like "Shipley-Mozingo Pumpkin Carving Day."

**Above, the four artists with our creations. You can see more pumpkin carving pictures in the "Halloween Fun" folder on Snapfish.**

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