Pumpkin Carving

One of my favorite fall traditions as a kid was carving our pumpkin.  Kristi and I would typically draw out what we wanted the face to look like, and my dad made it happen.  I'm pretty sure it was already apparent at a young age that she and I were not all that creative because our pumpkins always had the same triangle eyes, upside down triangle nose, and crooked toothy grin.  Always.  Clearly we were both destined to be CPAs instead of something a little more "artsy".  Anyway, my dad always did the actual carving, but Kristi and I were the ones to pull the "guts" out of the pumpkin. We loved it.

The girls have been so young, they never really got into the whole pumpkin-carving experience. We have done it, but they just didn't care.  Not this year.  Kate had been begging for weeks to carve a pumpkin so the weekend before Halloween I (stupidly) bought one of those carving sets at Target and brought it home.

I cut off the top, pulled on the stem, and tried to get the girls to start pulling out the seeds and junk. It was a no-go. Kate would NOT touch it.  It took some convincing, but then Karsten went to town digging stuff out.

Eventually Kate was convinced to try it out, but she made sure to use a spoon so her hands and fingers didn't touch anything. 

I said "stupidly" earlier, because the pumpkin carving kit that I bought had all of these designs for you to actually carve out. No easy triangles on our pumpkin. Kate picked out an owl, and so guess who had to carve that out?  I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Kate or Karsten.  Kate was so proud of her pumpkin though. 

It's a little hard to make out what it is in the daylight, but once the sun went down and we stuck a candle in it, you could definitely make out the owl. 

And that, my friends, was our 2016 pumpkin!