Jack 'o' Lanterns

Cooper has football practice Monday evenings which makes FHE hard, so occasionally we've tried to have it on Sunday evenings. However with the season changing it has started to get dark earlier, so his practices end at a better time for us to still have a family night. So last night we decided to carve our pumpkins for FHE. I had hoped to go as a family to the Berry Ranch nearby and go on a hayride and pick out our pumpkins, but it just wasn't happening. One of Mark's deacons grew pumpkins this year and was selling them to make money for his Eagle Scout project, so we decided to buy our pumpkins from him. The kids had fun picking one out and have been looking forward to carving them. We had a fun time together. Cooper only cut himself once and it was tiny and hardly bled (we let the boys try and carve their own). I helped Ella and Mark helped Seth. Seth thought this was the greatest thing we'd ever done and loves HIS little pumpkin. After we were done we took them outside and lit them all. The kids loved it! Dad's/Seth's pumpkin got voted as the scariest. John's pumpkin has two sides, so he can be scary or happy. With the marker we were using to draw the faces Ella wrote all over the back of hers. She's learning how to write her middle and last name and will take any opportunity she can get to write Ella Kayt Gunnerson on something. When we came back inside from lighting our pumpkins out front, Seth was walking around w/ the black permanent marker in one hand and the box of matches in the other! That's our boy, destructo, as we sometimes call him! Well, we did manage to have some fun, get everything cleaned up and the kids in bed all at a decent hour. Success!