Pumpkin Carving Fun

For family night tonight, Dan and I invited our families over for dinner and some pumpkin carving fun. We all pot-lucked soups and I made my yummy rolls. Since my house is small, our family is big, and carving pumpkins gets pretty messy, we held our family get together in the back yard. We built a camp fire to stay warm and everyone had a blast! 

We spread out big tarps for everyone to carve pumpkins on. We would just slop the pumpkin guts out onto the ground. It's amazing how easy clean up is when you can just shake out a tarp or use the hose :)

Hudson touched his pumpkin guts once and then preferred a much cleaner way of doing it. He used a scooper the rest of the evening. Each time he would scoop the insides of his pumpkin out he would carefully and slowly walk his scoopful over to the garbage can to throw it away. No messes for Hudson.

Dan helped most of the kids remove their pumpkin tops with his power tools. It sure makes pumpkin carving with 12 kids, under the age of 9, move alot quicker.

Kase carved most of his pumpkin by himself, with a little help from mom.

Hailey had fun doing her own pumpkin this year. She spent about 20 minutes stabbing her name into the back of her jack-o-lantern so it wouldn't get lost when it was sat by all the other pumpkins. It actually turned out pretty cool. Once it was lit you could see the light coming through her name holes.

Ky also did his own pumpkin from start to finish. He didn't even want help from Dan and his power tools getting his top off. It's so nice that the kids are starting to be able to do this on their own. It's was hard juggling 5 kids running around with knifes who all needed our help. 

This year Hudson was the only one who needed one on one attention.

Alaina's favorite part to carving pumpkins is designing a really cool face. This year she drew a mustasche on her pumpkin. Sadly, her knife had a mind of it's own and strayed from her lines a little. Opps!

4 more days til' Halloween!