Pumpkins

A week and a half past Halloween is a great time to write about carving pumpkins, right? Because they're still nice and fresh and sitting on our front porch and everything. 

Andrew went grocery shopping with the kids a few weeks ago (several weeks ago, if we're being honest, because it was before Alexander was born) and came home with an entire family of pumpkins: a daddy pumpkin, a mommy pumpkin, four little pumpkins, and a wee baby pumpkin.

Then a couple of days before Halloween, Jaker's Jack-O-Lanterns (by Harward Farms) came to the school and gave every single child in the school a pumpkin—and not just a piddly pumpkin, either; these were hard-to-carry-home size (but the kids did it)—so by Halloween we were basically drowning in pumpkins. 

Before we get to pumpkin carving, I'll show off Miriam's character pumpkin for school (which, if you're keeping track, means that she (1) carried her pumpkin home from school, (2) carried her decorated pumpkin back to school, (3) carried her decorated pumpkin back home so she could carve it—talk about a work out):

She decorated her pumpkin as Laura Ingalls (Wilder) and wrote the following paragraph:

Laura Ingalls Wilder is smart, kind, pretty, and mischievous. Laura is smart because she minded her mom, and kept out of trouble. She is kind, honest, and unselfish, because when it was Christmas she let her sister and cousins hold her new doll that she got. Laura wishes she had blonde hair like her sister Mary, but she has brown hair like her dad. Her dad says that she is beautiful, and I agree. She has a very spunky but sweet personality, too. I really like Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

Now for our night of carving!

Andrew helped Benjamin and Zoë with one of the big pumpkins:

They let him know exactly what they wanted (including a little eye right in the middle on its forehead):

Benjamin's job was scooping out the guts (he did not enjoy this task):

Miriam and Rachel each designed and carved their own pumpkins. I love this picture of snaggle-toothed Miriam giving her jack-o-lantern a snaggle-toothed grin:

And here's a picture of Rachel carefully cleaning the lid of her jack-o-lantern:

And here they all are on the front porch (including the super old jack-o-lanterns the girls carved at activity days two weeks before Halloween):

It's a good thing we still have a few (four) pumpkins that were spared the carving knife because I didn't get around to turning our jack-o-lanterns into pumpkin puree on Halloween night (it's like I had a two-week-old infant on my hands, or something). I'm sure our leftover pumpkins will find their way into the blender eventually (while our sagging, moldy jack-o-lanterns will one day make their way into the trash).