Pumpkin Carving 2009

One of the best things about living in our neighborhood, is all of the fun neighborhood parties.  One family hosts a neighborhood Easter egg hunt and breakfast, we have our Summer Solstice Party, sometimes there is a 4th or 24th of July parade and dinner, a fall dinner around Labor Day, a Halloween party and generally a Christmas open House.  (It's a good thing we like our neighbors, I guess.)  Anyway, last night was the annual Halloween Party at the Murdock's house.  They set up their garage and yard  for pumpkin carving.  They fill their garage with leaves and some of the coolest Halloween decorations around, set up tables and chairs, provide carving tools, and big bins to dump all of the pumpkin guts in.  There's a fog machine, a dry ice bubble machine, etc.. etc...  Another neighbor brings their soft serve ice-cream machine so everyone can have cones, and this year they also showed up with a hot chocolate machine.  Of course, there is also a delicious dinner of baked potatoes, with homemade chili and a variety of other toppings plus whatever the rest of us bring to share.  My kids generally put a little "big and strong food" on their plates and then promptly begin filling up on ice cream and other desserts. 

 After the pumpkins are carved, they are put on display with numbers and everyone votes on their favorites in different categories.  Needless to say, it is a fun party and we all look forward to it (except maybe Shawn gets tired of helping to carve the kids pumpkins.)  Here are the results from this year. 

 Amelia's pumpkin with googly eyes and teeth as per her request:

Samantha's pumpkin complete with marshmallow teeth:

And Jonas' award winning pumpkin.  He allowed Samantha to pick it out knowing she would choose something kind of ugly.

Here is the trophy awarded for the wildest carve.  (I flipped this photo the right way several times in iphoto but for some reason it will not transfer to my blog that way, so you'll just have to turn your head to see it correctly.  Sorry.)
All in all the evening was a success especially since the pumpkin carving mess and dinner remnants of the entire neighborhood were not left at our house for us to clean up.
Pumpkin