1 Our Pumpkin Story... Tragedy to Joy in 10 minutes flat!

We went to carve our pumpkin on Wednesday night and when we picked up our 2 week old pumpkin off the porch we were greeted with this:

A stinky, squishy pumpkin. Apparently this has been a problem for our poor Vermont pumpkins this year... with the flooding this spring and then Irene throwing her weight around.  But, we didn't let this ruin our carving fun!  Instead I grabbed our 6 little gourds and created some vampire and bat pumpkins a la Martha Stewart!

The kids were pretty excited to get these little critters put together.  I didn't use the mouth template, I just made a rectangle and then shaved it down to size so that the teeth fit in nicely.  The kids helped me add the eye pins and we were done.  The best part?  The teeth glow in the dark!

The bats were super simple.  I didn't have construction paper, so I printed out the wings in black, and then just did a full black box on the other side of the page and cut them out.  The hotglue didn't stick to well to the pumpkin and the wings kept falling off so instead I grabbed some black pins and used those to hold them all.  My kids also insisted the bats needed eyes, so two black pins did the job for that as well.

This was the easiest pumpkin carving I've ever done!  I gotta tell you, barely any mess and a very short period of time to get 6 super spooktacular pumpkins just makes me happy!