Mr. Jack-O-Lantern

Tonight was the designated pumpkin carving night!  Those 4 pumpkins were hanging around our living room all week just absolutely aching to come to life, I tell ya!  Right after dinner was cleared and a few necessary phone calls made, we got down to jack-o-lantern business.

You can see how Alex started out all nice and happy.  Melinda went to work on cleaning out her pumpkin.  Jacob loved the idea, but not the actually business of getting gooey.  Which is typical for him, really.  He doesn't like his hands getting dirty.  But he sure loved the tools for carving!

Once the pumpkins were emptied out, the face-making began.  Melinda and Jacob both drew a face on their pumpkins first, and then Jesse carved them out.   Jacob went a little hog-wild with the drawing, but he did get a face on there.  Not a carve-able face, mind you.  He did dots for eyes and a single line for a mouth. 

But after taking it over to Daddy, it got spruced up a little bit.  Same basic shape, with a little extra in the outline department.  Makes for a truly cool pumpkin designed by the resident 3-year-old!  I can't remember if it was Melinda or Jacob who later called it a "frustrated" pumpkin.

Melinda re-did her eyes several times, because she kept making them too small.  But eventually, she got what she (and I, by way of encouragement) were shooting for.  And then came the mouth... she's been practicing this on paper... she made it "scary".  "Because sometimes Halloween is scary, too, dad!" (And she said that completely cheerfully, like the scary part of Halloween is something exciting.)

During the cleaning-out stage, Alex lost his patience.  Completely.  If I wasn't holding him, Jesse was.  And since Jesse was doing the majority of the helping, I was holding him most of the time.  But for a while, Jesse held Alex while I cleaned out my monstrously thick and spaghett-squash-like pumpkin innards.  You can tell here that he's been pretty upset, what with the red face and tear-streaked cheeks..  Ahh, the teeth.  The second one is just about to break through, but in the meantime, Alex puts anything and everything in his mouth and chews hard.

Finally, I took Alex and Jesse got to carve his face.  Did the whole thing by hand and with his own imagination, old-school style.  No stencils for us this year!

After Jesse was finished, Alex was still upset.  So he went into the sling while I started drawing on my design.  And then as I started doing the first few bits of carving, I realized that he was asleep.  So, baby goes down, and I get my hands free for real carving.  Thank goodness, this was all starting to take a while!

I had gotten a carving idea from some blog out there and decided that's what I wanted to do this year, so I picked my pumpkin big and tall in order to make it work.  I'm happy with the way it turned out!  But I was last one working at the table by a long shot. 

And then, the photo shoot!  I must say, it's fun to have 4 pumpkins all lined up and glowing this year!  

They'll be transported to our ward Hallowen Trunk-or-Treat tomorrow night.  We'll see if anyone wins anything from the carving contest!  And of course, don't forget that there'll be photos of kids in their costumes tomorrow night!  Well, probably tomorrow.  If I get too tired, I reserve the right to post it all on Saturday.  ;)