For a fun family activity last night we thought it would be fun to do some pumpkin carving. It was an amusing evening that our two boys thoroughly enjoyed.
As soon as I left work, I picked up the boys and we drove down to a local outdoor produce stand that always seems to have a great selection of pumpkins, all in different shapes and sizes, each one seemed to have their own personality. I think Josh and Jake changed their minds on which pumpkin they each wanted about eight times. Originally Josh was really set on a small pumpkin just a little bit larger than my fist, (I don’t think I have the patience to carve a pumpkin that small), so I had to use my best diplomatic efforts to convince him to choose a different pumpkin. He eventually chose another one-- the largest one out there. Jake also chose one that I am sure outweighed him. I thought I would have to look up my car’s towing capacity in my owner’s manual to make sure I could get the pumpkins home.
After we arrived home and ate dinner, the boys were ready to get started. Before dinner, I picked out a great jack-o-lantern design from the tips and solutions pages on Lifetime.com, and printed it off. I chose the “happy template design”.
Since Mom was still cleaning up dinner and working on a treat for the family in the kitchen, we decided to take our pumpkin carving adventure out to the garage. I set up a 4-foot Lifetime folding table and placed a disposable plastic table cloth over it so that clean up will be really easy when we are finished. We set the pumpkins on the table and went to work. The boys were hovering over me like hawks, asking me what I was doing at every move. The best part was when I finished carving out the “lid” of the pumpkin and got to hear their squeals as we pulled on the stem and revealed the “guts” of the pumpkin.
The boys were having a great time. Cleaning out the pumpkin was a messy job that I thought Jake, our youngest, would love to do. But he was pretty tentative about sticking his hands in the pumpkin, so he was satisfied with just using the metal tongs provided by his mother.
After marking the template, I started carving the pumpkin. 
The boys were really interested while we were carving the first eye of the jack-o-lantern but by the time we started on the second eye, their attention span was gone and they were ready to wash their hands and ride their bikes around the garage. Before long, our “family activity” turned into dad, a lone man, carving a pumpkin in the garage.
When I finished the first pumpkin, we gathered everyone back together to place a light inside the pumpkin and set it out on our front porch. The boys were really proud how well their pumpkin turned out. The second pumpkin will have to wait until this evening, it was a school night and the boys had definitely had plenty of Halloween fun for one evening.