Pumpkins, Halloween part one.

And so another Halloween fades away. Whew. What a crazy one it was. I'm happy to say that after a week of forgoing all important housework, taking breaks only to pee and nurse the baby, I am finally out of Halloween costume-making hell. Although I will say that my kids looked pretty darn cute.

Halloween festivities began for us on Tuesday night with pumpkin carving. This is an annual event where the girls bug me all.day.long, chanting "Can we do pumpkins now? Can we do pumpkins now?" incessantly while I'm trying to do everyday normal things like oh, take a shower or eat. When the evening finally rolls around they are more than ready. They want to carve. They look like miniature cannibals on some exotic island, knives poised and ready, eyes gleaming, and excitement mounting.

Then Mommy reminds them that before you can carve a pumpkin, you have to clean the pumpkin. Mean old mommy.

So we cut the top off and everyone peers inside at the stringy goopy stuff that is pumpkin guts. I hand the first pumpkin off to Banana on about 4,328 sheets of newspaper (that will still somehow fail to contain all the goop by the end of night) and give her a scraper and tell her to have at it. She gleefully plunges her hands inside, only to yank them back out, spraying goop on the walls and seeds at the cat and yells "EWWWWWWWWWW that's so GROOOOOSSSSS Mommy!" and running off to wash her hands.

And so mommy ends up scraping out the pumpkin. Which mommy also thinks is pretty gross and not much fun, but when you're the mommy, that's just what you do.

Rinse and repeat with Kbear, who at least wants to help pull seeds out of the goop to roast, and an hour later we finally have two goop free, scraped out clean pumpkins primed for carving.

Here's the kiddos attempting to clean their pumpkins out:








Then of course I had to step in and finish the job, but it made for good photo ops.












Then it's Skippy's turn. If *I* got stuck cleaning pumpkin guts, at least he has to deal with two little girls who apparently think they attended some international pumpkin design school and want their carvings "just so." So after many sheets of paper, multiple rough drafts, messy marker smeared hands, and head scratchings later, and we finally had two pumpkin designs. Well, we had one - Kbear's looks like a circular scribble with mismatched eyes but we ran with it. Skippy starts cutting, with lots and lots and lots of "help."

Finally, an hour later the tea lights get lit and we have our finished jack-o-lanterns:



All of this of course, is just a precursor to the rest of our Halloween fun, but that's another blog for later today. Right now I have to run my sugar-hung-over kids to school.