Pumpkin Carving Party Turns Annual

Last year, we had an epic pumpkin carving party. I literally planned for weeks and spent days preparing. Ariana ended up over-inviting and we had 10 or 11 girls here (most spending the night!) Although Ariana had a blast, it was a huge endeavor.

Cut to this year when Ariana says to me last week, "When is my pumpkin carving party?"

Ummmm... I guess I had not realized that with such a fun party, she would expect it annually. And we only had one weekend left before Halloween... so I had about, oh, 3 days to prepare. Oh, wait, on top of that, Colby was away for 5 days at 'hunting camp'.

So this years pumpkin carving was way impromptu. As in, I went to get the food and pumpkins about 2 hours before guest were scheduled to arrive. I even had to buy premade cupcakes! Gasp! (Not that the 10 year olds had any idea, but I knew in my heart.) So this is all we ended up with:

To ewww it up a little, I threw some rats in the punch: some spiders on the cupcakes and vegetables: and wrote "Boo" across some sugar cookies that I whipped up: I did at least frost and decorate the cupcakes myself so I didn't feel quite so lame. The girls were kind enough to point out that I did not have the cool eyeball pops and jack-o-lantern fruit bowls from last year. Thanks for the guilt trip, kids.

The one cool thing I did do was in carving my pumpkin: I used a drill to put 60 holes into the pumpkin and then used some orange twinkle lights to stick into each hole to make a cool, glowing effect. The fun was in drilling the pumpkin and spewing the guts all over the kids around me.

So, it was not quite as epic as last years... but we had fun, nonetheless. And thanks to Kelly for keeping me sane and being a huge help!