Pumpkin Carving

Well, this past weekend we carved pumpkins. Its that time of year, and Sam and Sarah were ready to go. For those of you who have not carved pumpkins in years, the process has changed quite a bit from when I was a kid. Back then, carving a pumpkin usually involved borrowing one of you moms good knives, making eyes/nose and mouth, putting a candle in the pumpkin and lighting it up. These days, there are pumpkin carving kits that come complete with specialty detail cutters and templates that you trace right on to the pumpkin. Back to Sam and Sarah, unlike last year, I was able to convince Sam to pick a design for his pumpkin that was scary. Last year, he was a bit spooked by some of the pumpkin carving design patterns we had.
Of course, this family project started out with myself, Grandma and Grandpa supposedly "Helping" Sam and Sarah carve the pumpkins. I wanted to control access to sharp knives, but let the kids do most of the digging out of the pumpkin guts, and *some* supervised carving. When Sam realized he would have to put his hands inside a pumpkin and pull out his guts, he offered to let me take care of that task while he supervised. As I got into it though, he suddenly got interested in getting his hands dirty and joined in the fun. Sarah on the other hand, couldn't get enough. She dove right in, wandering around trying to help out with all the pumpkins (We had 4). She also go hold of some glitter glue and kept wanting to "Make the pumpkins Beautiful!" by putting the glitter all over them!.