Pumpkin Carving

We had a lot of fun carving pumpkins!  At least that's the story we're going to tell:

Andy wasn't so sure about scooping out the insides of the pumpkin:


Here's mom attaching the pattern:

Here's Sully, enjoying the show (as long as he had food):


And the final product (it's Pluto & Thomas - but you knew that):


Ok, now that you've seen the "fun," let's get real.  Whoever came up with the idea of using patterns and making intricate carvings should be disciplined.  Seriously.  Why can't we just carve nice faces - a few triangles for eyes, a nice, toothy smile - and that's it?  Oh no.  Now we buy teeny tiny knives, make thirteen copies of a pattern, adjusting the scale 5% at a time to get it the right size for the pumpkin, try to tape an 8.5 x 11 sheet of flat paper to a round pumpkin (I'm not sure where you buy a printer that prints on curved paper, or where you buy the paper for that matter), then you hold those teeny tiny knives and try to carve out little slits for light to shine through, while not breaking through the miniscule bit of pumpkin left between the slots.  This gets harder as your hand cramp up and turns into claws.  Then, you realize that even though you carved out these tiny little slits in the pumpkin, the gunk inside the pumpkin is still blocking the light.  Oh, but don't mess up the millimeter of pumpkin between your slits when you're cleaning out inside the pumpkin.  (sidebar - it's really hard to not type "ing" at the end of pumpkin.  So, if you see the word "pumpking" in this posting, please translate it to pumpkin and move on with your life. Thank you.)  The whole time you're doing this, your three year-old, who you are sacrificing all future possibilities of being a hand model for, is whining about when the pumpkin carving will be done; but when you ask if you can just do a face instead, he insists that you can't.  Finally, you finish.  And they actually look like what you wanted them to look like.  But then you get this bright idea that you should call both sets of grandparents and get them on Skype to see the pumpkins.  So you haul the laptop outside (apparently our laptop is the size of a freight train - thanks HP), turn off the porch light, and try to show them the pumpkins.  Finally, you need to get a picture of this masterpiece.  So you bring in the pumpkins, turn off all the lights in the house, listen to your one year-old cry because it's dark in the house, and snap a few shots.  Oh, but it's not that simple, apparently the slow shutter required for a night picture is not conducive to a shaky hand.  (please reference the aforementioned claw hands)  So you finally figure something out (I'm losing interest in this story).  And there you go.  Have a nice evening.  I'm going to bed.

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