In honor of Halloween I thought I would post some pictures from our pumpkin farm visit and pumpkin carving extravaganza. We have been going to the pumpkin farm with the same group of friends for the last five years and our kids love this tradition! Every year the kids get a little bit older and we are able to do more things. The first year all of the kids were about one year old and all we did was eat and walk through the pumpkin patch. This year all of the older kids are around five and the younger siblings range from 2-3.5 years old and we had a bunch of fun going down slides, digging in corn, eating hot dogs and finding the perfect pumpkin.
It took our 5yo a really long time to find the perfect pumpkin and when she did it was super tall and heavy.
It was so tall we had to carve it on the floor. Normally I have old vinyl tablecloths hanging around for crafts but we were completely out so we made a frugal choice and saran wrapped part of our kitchen floor. It worked well and we had a super fast clean up.
The kids are still pretty young and the do not like touching gross things so they helped a little bit with the carving but in the end I did most of the pumpkin cleaning out and Mr. Oscoey did all of the carving since he is our resident carving expert.
This year I bought some small white pumpkins and let the kids paint them. It worked pretty well and I think we will try it again next year with larger pumpkins and see how it goes. I am a huge fan of buying lots of pumpkins for decorations and carving but one of the frugal choices we made this year was to cut back on our Halloween decoration buying. I didn’t think the kids would actually carve their pumpkins though so I did end up buying four of these little ones for under $10.00 and we used painting supplies we had on hand so this fun craft was fairly cheap. Maybe next year we will have our garden back into shape and we will be able to grow our own pumpkins again!
Our finished pumpkin! Our kids are obsessed with The Nightmare Before Christmas right now so our 5yo chose a Jack pumpkin this year.
Our son’s pumpkin is rather squashed and was too difficult to carve so he used some leftover plastic eyeballs and and a mouth to make “Zero” from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I would have loved to buy up a bunch more of these types of decorations since the kids can use them over and over again but we exercised our frugal muscle this year and made do with what we had on hand. I do need to remember to buy new carving tools though when they go on sale after Halloween since our last knife did not make it through the experience of carving Jack and Mr. Oscoey had to improvise with a kitchen knife (they are way less nimble). We also have a couple of pumpkins from the kid’s school carnival on our porch that are decorated with stickers and the fabulous green one I found at the pumpkin patch.
What kinds of pumpkins did you decorate this year?
