I feel like we spend an awful lot of time in the kitchen in various stages of food prep, cooking, eating, and cleaning up from eating.  Since we're in there so often, I let the kids help out with some of the tasks.  LET is the operative word here, since the HELP is often more work for me than if I just did it myself.  Not wanting to be to uptight about the way things are done and wanting to keep everyone occupied, the kids have taken over the primary responsibility for two tasks - putting away the clean silverware, and cutting stuff up.  The end result of this busywork is that both of the kids are pretty good with knives.  Martin is more precise in his chopping, but Sophie has him on endurance.  She'll sit and chop vegetables for me for 45 minutes without losing interest.  So this year, I decided to let them do most of the carving on their own.

We started by scooping out the guts.  Sophie didn't like putting her hand inside the pumpkin, but she did like picking the seeds out of the guts.  She's diligent, this one.


Martin didn't mind putting his arm in the pumpkin.  His head either.  If he could have fit his entire head inside the pumpkin, I have no doubt that he would have.


Sophie spent probably half an hour picking seeds out of the pumpkin guts.  I was glad to pass this job onto someone else, and we ended up with plenty for roasting.


Next year I bet that Martin won't pick such a tall pumpkin.  He kept worrying about getting pumpkin slime in his armpits.  And that's not a conversation you have every day.


Sophie's pumpkin design included a lot of drawing, and very little cutting.  She made a few small cutout circles, and the rest was decorated with ink.


Martin's design had giant cutout spaces including several lost teeth, reflective of his own smile.


The carved pumpkins stayed on our front stoop into the next week where they looked very festive.  On the following garbage day I thought about how they should go out with the trash, but that was the same day I brought Marty home from his surgery so it slipped my mind.  Each day since, I thought about putting them in the bin when I walked by them on my way to and from the bus stop.  But I'm easily distracted, and within seconds of thinking about moving them to the bin, I was already mentally onto something else.  Until yesterday when we went to the bus and noticed that the pumpkins had launched themselves off of their spot on the stoop and were slumped into a mushpile on the ground.  With the candy all gone and the pumpkins in the bin, Halloween is officially over.