Pumpkin Carving

Every year after hollowing out the pumpkins with the kids, Mike and I like to try to surprise the boys with their own jack-o-lanterns before Halloween.

2009 Jack-O-Lanterns

2010 Jack-O-Lanterns

This year I decided to surprise the boys with jack-o-lanterns carved with their favorite Pixar movie characters. For Aidan I carved Wall-E, and for Caleb I carved Remy from “Ratatouille”. This was the first year that I ever carved a pumpkin in 3 layers using a scraping technique. I copied the Wall-E outline from one of my friend’s who had carved it the previous year, and I found the Remy pumpkin stencil online. For scraping, I used an Xacto knife and a pumpkin scraping tool. Both pumpkins took me a week to carve, and although it was a fun challenge (to see if I could even do it), I don’t know if I’ll do again next year…it was a bit time consuming. However, both pumpkins turned out great. Mike was so impressed he used the Remy jack-o-lantern as his iPhone background and the kids were really happy to use their jack-o-lanterns as temporary nightlights during Halloween weekend.

Pumpkin Scooping Day 2011

“Pumpkin Scooping” day thankfully ended up being a sunny day rather than a rainy one. It has now become a tradition with our family that on “Pumpkin Scooping” day, Mike and I help the kids’ scoop the guts from their pumpkins, then the seeds are weeded out for roasting in the oven and snacking. Then later during the week, Mommy and Daddy secretly carve out special jack-o-lanterns for each boy to surprise and give them the night before Halloween. “Pumpkin Scooping” day this year ended up being interesting because neither of our boys wanted to dig their hands into the pumpkins this time. They were willing to scoop out the pumpkins for a little while with their long spoons, but soon they were saying things like, “Eww! My hand sticky!”, “The inside feels yucky!”, and “I just want to pick out the seeds, but I don’t want to touch that yucky stuff”. So while they picked out the seeds, Mike and I got down into those pumpkins and dug out the guts for our boys.



What really didn’t make sense was what happened next: The boys decided they wanted to get their shovels and try planting some of the pumpkin seeds in the dirt. Mike and I shook our heads as we watched both our boys dig into the dirt with their shovels and hands planting those pumpkin seeds. To make things even more over-the-top, Aidan and Caleb soon started showing us the worms that they were finding in the dirt and collecting. How these two dirt-worm-loving kids couldn’t hollow out a pumpkin was definitely beyond us that day. But one thing that we all seemed to be able to dig into was the pumpkin pie for dessert after dinner.