Pumpkin Carving

Caleb was way too little last year to enjoy making a jack o'lantern, but at almost 19 months, we thought he was old enough to try it this October. Caleb picked out a great looking pumpkin on our trip to Marker Miller Ochards, but I didn't want to butcher such a large pretty pumpkin when we could leave it out to enjoy until Thanksgiving. Instead, I'd planned to buy him a smaller pumpkin from the grocery store or the Stokes Market in town but never got around to it. I asked Dave to look last Friday while he was at Walmart to see what he could find, but all the pumpkins had been picked over. He tried looking at Stokes' and Food Lion but found nothing. On our way home from the Monster Mash, we decided to stop by Walmart again and choose a pumpkin even if it wasn't awesome. However, there were only four sad looking pumpkins left. Dave chose one that wasn't rotting too much. The check-out lady suggested putting a weird face on it to help but I don't think there was truly going to be any help for this pitiful looking pumpkin:

"Lumpkin the Pumpkin"

Lumpkin's good side

I wanted to do the carving in the driveway to prevent pumpkin from being slung all over the house, but Sunday was still pretty messy outside and we didn't have much time to carve Caleb's pumpkin before Halloween. I decided to lay down a plastic tablecloth on the kitchen floor, bring in Caleb's picnic table, and tackle this project inside.

Caleb has no idea what Daddy's doing but is excited anyway.

Cautiously sticking his hand in the pumpkin at our prompting

At his age, Caleb was oblivious to how ugly our pumpkin was. He loved the whole pumpkin gut slinging event.

After realizing how fun pulling out the slime was, Caleb
went to "work" elbow deep in fall fun.

Attacking the pumpkin with both hands as suggested by Pop Pop

I love pictures of these two together. :)

Of course he had to taste a little.

Here I guess he is explaining to me what it tasted like.

Pop Pop needed a taste too. Yuck!

So much fun!

We enjoyed watching him as much as he enjoyed making a mess.

He wasn't afraid of getting his hands dirty and got the system of scooping out the goop and putting in the trashcan very quickly. We have a natural pumpkin scooper outer!

After the pumpkin interior was thoroughly emptied and scrapped, I was assigned the task of making a face. Caleb did his best to help with the carving process with the dull utensil he was given.

Pop Pop made the toothy faced jack o'latern even better by putting a hat on it; Caleb loved this idea! My dad and Caleb have a special ritual they do with Dad's hat. Caleb takes the hat off Dad's head and then they both shake their heads and make a funny noise. Caleb kept trying to make the pumpkin shake its head and join in the ritual. (You can see a little of this in the video below.)

He also showed Caleb that if you talked inside the pumpkin it made an echo. It was a great lesson in fun from one of his favorite people.


I'm glad we braved the mess (which really wasn't that bad after all) and started a tradition all of us loved.