Carving Pumpkins

We carved pumpkins Friday evening the 29th. We started a little later than I would have liked but I figured it would take 2 hours tops to do it. Well it took us a lot longer than that. The kids did have a lot of fun but they took a long time deciding how to carve 2 pumpkins each. Jacob would take a half hour cleaning out his pumpkin and then you would look inside and see that he still had half his seeds and pumpkin pulp inside of it. He was taking so long. He also drew on his pumpkin about 30 times trying to figure out what to do.

Kaelen wasn't around for carving this year. He had been sick for a few days and then Friday he started throwing up and had a fever of 104 degrees. He spent most of his day laying on the couch watching TV and then in the evening he was asleep when we carved pumpkins. Enoch ended up carving Kaelen's pumpkins for him. He did 2 things though that we knew Kaelen would absolutely love. He carve a puppy on one of his pumpkins and a balloon and moon on the other.

Rachel's pumpkins she did a ghost face and then her name and peace and hearts on it. She did a great job carving herself. She scares me still carving when she has really sharp knives and is digging into the pumpkins. We only had 1 carving kit and so we had to share. I am going this week when everything is on clearance and am going to buy 3 more kits. We need a kit for each of us.



Jacob in the end didn't finish till midnight (yah I know it was late and I am a nice mom for letting him stay up to finish them). He carved a bunch of his but then was having a hard time so I finished them for him. Enoch had gone to bed with Kaelen who was just coughing and crying and needed somebody to sleep with him and so I finished with the kids and then cleaned up the very large pumpkin mess.



I had a really big mess too because my favorite thing in the whole wide world is saving all the pumpkin seeds and then baking and seasoning them. Jacob and I love to eat them. This year as well we got well over 8 cups of pumpkin seeds. It was so awesome. So I had to clean up my mess from those as well when cleaning. I didn't get to bed till 1 AM.



Carving pumpkins did take way longer than planned but it was really fun and I am glad that the kids were able to design their own pumpkins and have tons of fun doing it.

Directions on baking pumpkin Seeds:

Clean and rinse pumpkin seeds in colander with cold water.

Place seeds on paper towels to dry as best you can. (I never get them very dry, but just a little more than when they were just rinsed)

Place in bowl with 2 T olive oil and your favorite seasoning. I will do some with season salt, salt and both. I use anywhere from 2tsp to 1 T.

Place on a cookie sheet and bake in a 350 degree oven. (I have read over the years about cooking them at 200 degrees but they take so long.) I like mine crunchy so I will cook it about 15 minutes then stir the seeds real well and then put them in for another 15 to 2o minutes. Once the seeds don't look oily and wet anymore then I know they are done.

Let the seeds cool and then enjoy eating them. I will store mine in an airtight container till we eat them. They will last quite a while but ours never does because it is one of our favorite things to eat.