Pumpkin Carving Party

(The above pumpkin was the one carved by the big boys and daddy ~ 

I love a classically carved pumpkin!)

Y'all this post that I'm sharing today is all about one of my all-time favorite family traditions ~ our annual Pumpkin Carving Party. I suppose it isn't exactly a party since it's just our immediate family, but there is eleven of us, so I guess that's enough people to constitute a party, lol! 

 Our pumpkin carving party includes fun festive food like jack-o-lantern chicken pot pie, pumpkin patch dirt cake, and orange ice cream floats. We also read the Pumpkin Patch Parable. While we carve our pumpkins we play fun Halloween music. 

Even when we weren't 'celebrating' halloween we always did our pumpkin carving party. I mean what is so bad about reading a sweet bible-based story, eating cute food, and carving a pumpkin?!

I've been on the hunt for the 'perfect' dirt cake for many years, and I think I finally found it with this one. I'm not so sure if it was the actually recipe or the fact that I left some of the Oreo cookies kind of thicker instead of pulverizing the whole bag in my high powered blender. Talk about yummy! 

Yes, y'all I did splurge and ate a few bites!!

My little dinner helper that night. I can remember the days when we couldn't even eat one chicken pot pie and now were throwing down two of them, lol.

Obviously the traditional pumpkin carving party group photo was not going to happen this night. In their defense, over half of them were pretty sick~ sigh, I hate when my babies are sick!

This year we carved two pumpkins. Daddy and I carved one with the little children while the bigger boys tried their hands at doing one all by themselves.

The fellas learned real quick that carving pumpkins isn't as easy as it looks. 

There's nothing quite like a little hands-on learning. 

There's just something fascinating about carving a pumpkin. 

All that goop, strings, and seeds.
**note**
Make sure you put news paper down under the pumpkins before you start to carve,
it makes clean-up so much easier; and that's speaking from years of experience!

Everyone took a turn digging out the pulp and getting all yucky. 

FUN! FUN! A perfect activity for little boys who love to get dirty.

Even though Lydia was puny, she thoroughly enjoyed her turn at scraping out the pumpkin. She was so serious about the task, taking every opportunity to explore the pumpkin and it's contents.

Nothing fancy for our family's pumpkin carving. As a matter of fact the one dear ol' mom carved barely resembled the cat I intended it to be!! But, my children, forever the optimists, didn't judge and even said the pumpkin looked like a cat, lol. I suppose it really isn't that the pumpkins are carved into some intricate design, but the simple fact that we spent precious time together making memories. 

Creating family traditions really is super easy and takes little effort from mom and dad, mostly only in the planning phase, anyways. This particular family tradition we've been doing for 19 years ~ ever since we had our first son. Over the years it has been adapted, but for the past couple of years I've set in stone the menu and activities. This way everyone knows what's coming for our yearly Pumpkin Carving Party. Having a plan also makes my job super easy and insures we actual DO our annual Pumpkin Carving Party! Let's face it, life get's super busy and it can become super easy to simply say "next year", but remember we can't get this day back ~ the years fly by, make every day count! 

With Love & Hope,

Jennifer