Pumpkin Carving

To be perfectly honest, I really don't like pumpkin carving. At all. I thought if I didn't mention anything about it, my kids would forget. It was actually working, until two days before Halloween when Tori brought home a pumpkin from school that they used in a science experiment. I was this close! lol. So I promised the kids that the next day I would take them to get pumpkins, not realizing what a task that would be. You see, all throughout the month, each time I would go into any store there would be hundreds of pumpkins in bins outside of the stores. I thought we would just drive up to any old store pick out big wonderful looking pumpkins and be on our way. Boy was I wrong. Apparently every store in Colorado sold out of all of their pumpkins a few days before Halloween, and there were no pumpkins to be found! I felt so bad as we went from store to store only to be disappointed. Finally on our way home we decided to stop by one last place. We were thrilled to see a small box labeled pumpkins out front. I dropped Alexis off in front of it and went to find a parking spot. It turns out there were two pumpkins left! They were pretty sad looking, but they were pumpkins none the less so we snatched them up. Luckily Tori had hers that she got from school, so we got the other two for Levi and Alexis. Poor Scarlett didn't get one, but that's ok, because we waited until she went to bed to carve them. (Oh the life of the fourth child)

Here is Alexis all ready to begin scooping hers out. You can kind of see the ugly marks on the pumpkin. There was one good side though that was perfect for the face, so we lucked out.

In Tori's class at school, they made volcanoes out of carved out pumpkins. Luckily hers was all cleaned out and ready to carve when she brought it home. It was really pretty and big too =)

Here's cute Levi all ready to scoop his pumpkin out. Or so he thinks. He had no idea what was to come.

Yes those are tears, and that is one disgusted boy. He would hardly get through scooping out the pumpkin without gagging. I took mercy on him halfway through and scooped the rest out for him.

Alexis on the other hand had no problem whatsoever with the sliminess of scooping hers out. It's so funny to see the differences between each of our kids. Look at all that slime!

Levi tried very carefully to scoop it out without touching any of the gross stuff.

Tori was happy as can be to skip that part and get right to carving.

If you though I took a picture of the finished products all lit up on our porch, you are sadly mistaken. I have no idea how I forgot that part. So is life these days.  Levi had Brandon draw a scary face on his and  then fell asleep on the couch as I carved it out. Alexis worked for an hour carving a ghost on the front of hers, only to have the whole thing cave in right as she was about to finish (luckily we had a good sense of humor about it and we got a good laugh out of it) And Tori worked really hard on her silly faced pumpkin and it turned out really cute  

It ended up being a fun night. Although I really don't like carving pumpkins I need to get over that so the kids can have fun memories like this. Next year I will just have to make sure to get our pumpkins early!