Halloween Prep, y'all.

(I don't know what exactly the "y'all" is about.  I'm feeling sort of punchy at the moment, I guess.)

A couple of weekends ago our big Sunday fun was carving pumpkins.  Here's a little full disclosure for you: I hadn't really planned on carving pumpkins this year.  The kids spend the week with their dad so it seems sort of silly to go to the expense for something they'd see twice.  Plus, they're getting to that age where holidays just aren't as big a deal as they used to be.  Or so I thought.  So when Molly asked if we were carving pumpkins I didn't think to consult Kerig, I just said no.  It was a decision I'd already made.  Although, Kerig had apparently made his own decision about the situation, and as soon as he heard me say no, he chimed in with "Yes, we are."  Well, okay then.  It hadn't occurred to me that maybe he was looking forward to this.  So I was happily overruled.

We went to the local pumpkin patch  nursery garden center and chose our pumpkins. Ted, Kerig and I chose moderate sized pumpkins - something big enough for carving room, but not so large as to be a pain in the neck to carry upstairs.  Molly, on the other hand, bought into BIGGER IS BETTER and picked out one of the biggest ones they had.

At home we washed them off, spread some newspaper, cranked Pandora's Halloween station and went to work.  Molly had already picked out her design from the pattern book that came with the tools - a ghoul at a graveyard spookily raising his hand.  Since I really wasn't super into it, I just went with a standard jack-o-lantern face, with rounded features.  Kerig contemplated his design for quite some time and settled in on a menacing jack-o-lantern face with sizable fangs.

Ted, however, was the man this year.  I don't think of Ted as being super artistic, but he's very good with the fixing/building/figuring out of things.  He decided that he wanted to do Snoopy asleep on his doghouse.  He asked to borrow my laptop and searched google images until he found something suitable to use as a guide.  And I'll be darned if he didn't make it work!

It's really nice having Kerig around.  He's quick to pick up a camera and he's good at it, too.  He stepped right in, made certain there was a picture of everyone working as well as final product shots, and lots of other details.  It was hard to not use all the pictures, but I managed to whittle it down to just 6 pictures and then printed them relatively small.

And then I carefully crammed them all onto one page:

Since I struggle when using more than one picture on a page, I feel rather triumphant that I was able to semi-effectively cram 6 pictures on here.  Go me!

Hey, so, uh, this was up on the Silhouette blog yesterday.  If you're so inclined, you can click this link and check it out again over there.  Cuz yeah. Why not?
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