Pumpkin Carving Family Night

Our activity for family night last night was pumpkin carving. The cheapest place we found to get pumpkins this year was Stater Bros. Pumpkins were only 19 cents a pound. The biggest pumpkin I got was over 16 pounds, and less than $3.00.

Getting Started. (Guess no one said to say "cheese".)

We let the kids draw their own face designs on their pumpkins.


Duncan did his most detailed pumpkin face to date.


There's Jennan's.

Tegan waiting patiently.

After everyone had their faces drawn, Anna and I helped the younger kids hollow out their pumpkins and carve out the faces. And by helped I mean, we pretty much did it for them. After I cut the bottom out of Liam's pumpkin, I had him pull out all the "guts". I also cut out the bottom of Duncan's, and had him do the same. They were both a little timid about getting their hands all gooey, and it was too "stringy". So I got a scraper and scraped their pumpkins for them, but I left all the guts inside and had them pull it out. Again they were a bit timid, so I grabbed their hands and put them way in the pumpkins, my hand was behind theirs, and helped them curl their fingers to grab a big handful of guts. Then I pulled my hand out and told them to not let go and pull the guts out. They did. They each pulled all the guts out of their pumpkins.

I cut out Liam's face, trying to stay as close to his lines as possible. After I cut out a piece, I had Liam get the piece out. Duncan on the other hand wanted to get started right away, so I gave him a pumpkin cutter and he went to town. He had no real help doing his. (After he finished cutting a piece, I would go through his cuts again to make sure they were connected.)

Also at this point, the batteries in our camera died. We have no batteries to replace them with, bummer. But then I remembered our video camera has a "photo" setting, and has a full battery charge, so I got it out. The quality is no where near our regular camera, but it did the job.

Here's Jennan and her finished jack-o-lantern.

Liam with his completed jack-o-lanterns. The little one is from his field trip. The face is just drawn on. I think he tried to copy his big pumpkin. He did a good job if he did.

There goes Duncan, carving like a mad man! At one point he said his arm was hurting from all the cutting. Anna showed him how to "shake it out", and he kept at it. He was very determined.

Duncan's still going, but everyone else is done. Tegan got the draw on her pumpkin too. She was happy with that.

Anna and I didn't get a chance to carve our pumpkins during family night. We spent that time making sure the kids were enjoying their time making jack-o-lanterns. And we all had a good time.

After getting the kids to bed, we did carve our pumpkins.

Here's Anna's.

And here's mine.

Here they are all together.

It was a fun family night.