Halloween Eve

The day before Halloween we decided to finally carve the pumpkins that we had gotten from Sawyer's birthday train ride. Earlier we'd bought a carving kit that came with little plastic carving tools and stencils. Matt started cutting into his pumpkin first and the itsy bitsy teeny weeny carving knife that came in the kit was bent in a matter of seconds and no wonder, his pumpkin was close to 4 inches thick! We broke out the big knives and really got to work. 

Sawyer did his part in scooping out some of the slimy insides. 

And Moxie helped too. 

Nothing captions the photo below better than what my Grandpa Hansen wrote after seeing it on Facebook, "Hey you guys threw away my punkin guts!" 

Both of our pumpkins had guts galore! We probably could have made a few batches of roasted pumpkin seeds with it, but neither one of us wanted to pick the seeds out one by one from the goopy mess (as you can see below). 

The second thing we discovered after taking all the goop out, was that WE WERE NOT CUT OUT to cut out complicated shapes into our pumpkins even if we had a stencil. I'd seen the amazing carved pumpkins many of our family and friends had done so we thought it was going to be easy. WRONG! It takes a lot of patience and skill so we both opted for much, much simpler carvings, as in two eyes and a mouth or in Matt's case, his pumpkin got only one eye and a mouth. 

After the lighting ceremony we took a photo of our nose-less masterpieces.

Then we set up the camera to get all of us and the pumpkins in a photo together. 

First try...
Nope missed the pumpkins entirely. 

Second Try....

Yea that didn't work either. 

Third Try....
 Okay, that'll do.