Pumpkin Carving!

Yesterday we finally carved our pumpkins! We had bought three, one for each of us a week or so ago at the grocery store for 99cents each! Not to shabby! We were going to go to the pumpkin farm but it has been way to cold and I really didn't want to take monkey out in it for to long. Plus I think she will get more out of the experience next year when she is older.

Monkey is still to young to help out this year with the carving but she still had fun watching us work. It took a lot longer then I thought it would. Scooping the guts and getting all of them out was harder then I remember. We had a decent amount of pumpkin seeds after all three were emptied though which was nice. It took a loooong time to separate the pumpkin seeds from the pumpkin guts and we finally ended up boiling them in salt water once we got most of the pumpkin off. Then into the oven to be baked! Once that was done it was back to the pumpkins to carve. 

Chris cutting the tops off.

Scooping out the guts.

Monkey watching from her high chair.

Chris's evil face while scooping out his pumpkin. I don't know how his hand fit in there! lol!

Lots of seeds!

Trying to get them to separate.

The finished product.

I picked the cat pattern to carve and it wasn't really that fun to try and get it to stay on. The instructions said to use tape. Yeah like that was going to work! I finally had to use push pins in the parts that were going to be carved out and that worked like a charm! I didn't press hard enough with the tool to indent into the pumpkin though so when I took the pattern off it was a pain to use the drill tool to make the holes bigger. Next year I am just going to use the drill tool right on the pattern to make the holes. It would have been so much easier! 

My solution to an annoying problem.

Chris working on his.

The finished pumpkins.

Carving took a long freaking time! I'm glad that we got tools with the patterns though because I couldn't see me carving anything other then a circle and squares if I had to use one of our kitchen knifes. Mine turned out beautiful though! Chris used the ghost pattern which was also neat! The third one I just did something simple because by this time it was already like 8 o'clock or maybe even later and we started at 3pm!! It was fun to carve them though. I really don't remember the last time I carved a pumpkin, let alone baked the seeds. They were sooo good and we ate tons. We had to bake them in two batches. I found out later though that there are a lot of calories in pumpkins seeds so I made Chris bring what was left to work with him so I wouldn't eat anymore! I ate so many of the darned things! It was a good pumpkin carving experience and we were sure to take lots of photos.