Carving pumpkins...

We decided to carve our pumpkins Sunday night with "Grannama" visiting. Gran's birthday is tomorrow and Halloween is one of her favorite holidays. Knowing I have little interest from my boys to get involved in this holiday, I took advantage of having her here to help.

Since we were carving nearly a week in advance, I read up on how to make our pumpkins last longer. First step was simply to wash the exteriors well with soap and water. Fender LOVED this part of the experience. I gave him the dishcloth and he washed them all down while I cut the tops off.

Next came the clean out. Long story short...Fender wanted nothing to do with getting pumpkin guts all over his hands. See video below. He repeatedly insisted..."No get dirty...no use hands. I use the spoon." Not much scooping got done with the spoon, so I had the honor of gutting the pumpkins. No worries, though. I enjoy it! I've included a picture of the innards from our giant pumpkin this year. It may gross some out...but it looks pretty cool to me.
 
 
 
 

Videos:
Okay. I think the videos work now. If not, you can see the first one here: Fender's Pumpkin Cleaning video.







Gran and I were up until 3:30AM finishing the pumpkins...granted we only officially started working on the patterns at midnight. They were definitely the most advanced designs we had tried to date and mom's was even labeled "Advanced Level 3" while mine was "Intermediate Level 2." We mostly complained about the difficulty the whole time and then laughed about how we kept complaining but were determined to see it through. It was tons of fun. We still have one more pumpkin left to carve, but we haven't decided on a design for it yet and I'm still trying to talk Daddy into carving one. We'll see. The rest of the "preservation" included washing pumpkins, inside and out with bleach water to kill any germs or bacteria that cause decay and then coating the inside and carved area with petroleum jelly to keep moisture in and everything else out. Petroleum Jelly is terribly hard to work with and only time will tell if I managed to coat anything properly. Oh well, I gave it a shot.

Here is a closer up of the two we finished. Mine is the Panther and Grans is the Dragon.