Carving Pumpkins

I am such a slacker this year. We haven't carved a pumpkin yet. I do have 4 that I bought on Wednesday, but we have been so busy this week. Last year I let the girls paint their pumpkins, but this year I am thinking of letting them help carve a pumpkin. Well mainly scoop the guts out. What do you think? Are they still too young and should I stick to painting.

 

I tackled this one last night! They all got to scoop...and :wub: it. They spent A LOT of time doing it. Then I cut the faces out...and they carry their "friends" everywhere with them. I'm so glad I did it. And, if you set it under the light, if you take the lid off and on, it looks like you light them up without actually doing so :good:

Oh, and right now we are roasting our seeds. They were soooo excited for those, too.

 

I'm planning on doing this later after the girls get home from the sitter's house. I think they are going to LOVE scooping out the seeds and they were asking for pumpkin pie last night (don't know why!), so I'm going to save the innerds to make a pie, bread or cookies.

 

We painted pumpkins yesterday with our moms group. It was fun for the kids! Our fam is coming over on Halloween so we can trick or treat together. Anyways, we were going to carve pumpkins before the T-or-T. I think they will like "scooping" out the insides. We shall see. :unsure:

 

We plan on doing this tonight. I can only imagine what a disaster area my kitchen will look like after 2 3.5 year olds have finished scooping the seeds out. I'm looking forward to it though.

 

Let them scoop!

 

My DH let our girls get all the guts out last year. This year I think they scooped a little, but didn't like getting their hands all in the muck.

 

We're heading outside to scoop out the seeds tonight or tomorrow. They will insist on carving, too, and I'm not sure how to handle that - probably by carving faces after they go to bed. But I can't wait to see how they react to the goopy mess.

 

We're doing this tonight. They've not been too interested in Halloween until this year, so this will be a first. I will have them help with whatever they'd like from this list: scooping, pointing out where the eyes and mouth and nose should go, and telling me what kind of eyes etc. they'd like (I've drawn some faces on paper for them to pick from). The adults will do the carving ;-)

 

We did this tonight and the girls had fun directing me. They didn't want to scoop, which is strange because they usually LOVE getting dirty, but did tell me what faces to make and helped me draw them on the pumpkins before I carved them. They were very excited about the whole thing even if they didn't want to roll up their sleeves and get a little dirty.

 

Scoop away... we cut and scooped our pumpkin about two weeks ago when my mom was visiting. The girls enjoyed telling Grandma what to do and Cricket had fun scooping. Piper said it made her hands feel funny. Oh, they both also had a blast stirring the pumpkin (the inside) with long wooden spoons. I'm not sure how it started, but that was the biggest hit.

 

The older two love to scoop out the guts. I let Rebekah try and she didn't like it too much, so be prepared for being grossed out by the guts! However, they do like the results! GL!

 

We bought 3 of those kits from Target that are like Mr. Potato Head. One was a skeleton, one was a witch and the other was a princess. So, they stuck those in the 3 pumpkins that we actually ended up growing ourselves. But, we also had 3 huge pumpkins they picked from the pumpkin patch. We did ours on Thurs. night. My 6 yr. old did almost all of hers (needed help scooping), but the 4 yr. olds told us what design they wanted to for the top to be taken off and then what shape for eyes, nose and mouth. Then, we drew them on to make sure that's what they wanted and then we (DH and me) carved them. They helped scoop out he seeds though.