I have mentioned it before, but I absolutely love fall because of all the beautiful color and all the pumpkins. As I look outside lately the “fallish fall” is almost gone though and now replaced with the part of fall that I dread…the “winterish fall”, or the dead looking fall. It is where all the leaves have fallen from the tread and everything is officially dead, brown, and wet/rain soaked. It seems like such a sad time. BUT I don’t want to talk about ANOTHER sad topic. Yesterdays Covid Awareness was sad enough…if you missed it the main take away was this video.
Anyway, today we are covering a little bit lighter topic, or heavy if you happen to have chosen a really large pumpkin this year. Anyway, you can actually get pumpkins via grocery pick up from WALMART! Awesome right? That is where we got all of these! They all turned out to be so cute! Let me take you through our pumpkin carving day!
Make it an experiment:
One way to make pumpkin carving unique is to make it an experiment! Make up a little page about what your kiddos think the inside of the pumpkin will look like, an estimate of how many seeds it will have, and some drawings of how they want to carve it. This year was especially cool because we had a white pumpkin. We have never carved a white pumpkin before so we didn’t know what the inside would look like! (Parent tip: The white pumpkins are WAY easier to clean out BUT they don’t last as long before molding as the orange ones do.) Here is our pre-carving set up! You can grab an amazon pumpkin carving kit here!
Having the Kiddos Help Carve!
My daughter loves to help carve off the top of the pumpkin, once the top comes off and she remembers what the inside looks like…she is DONE! This is pretty much the point in time that she checks out and watches from afar. But if the kiddos are old enough to help carve this is a really fun experience.
Look at all the GOO…
In case you were wondering…or needed a spoiler alert. This is what the inside of a white pumpkin looks like after you pop the top off! I stand corrected…this is where my daughter checked out of the activity. She was gagging about the pumpkin dramatically!
Scoop it out and collect the seeds for roasting!
Each year we collect the seeds for roasting. Last year my daughter helped me wash them. This year not a chance. AND she didn’t taste them but we made some honey roasted pumpkin seeds that had a very interesting flavor with them. These white pumpkins are very easy to clean out and the seed separate from the goo amazingly. They are actually pumpkins for eating I guess…did a little research on it.
Carve it CUTE!
My daughter did pick the final design from her design sheet I mentioned earlier in the post. The make it an experiment and then draw a few designs. She wanted hearts carved out around her pumpkin. So that is the final pumpkin. It actually worked great because it a later activity we used these hearts that were carved out and decorated them with paint and glitter too! I think this will probably be tomorrows post!
A little blogtober update:
Another day another BLOG! October this year has been really busy for me and posting has been really hit and miss. With a masters degree, homeschooling, and a few other things. My goal of daily posting Monday through Friday just didn’t happen. So, far I have posted 15 posts this month which is more than my monthly average. BUT instead of going up and improving and growing in readership like I normally do in October, I went down.
I have taken a HUGE hit for several things! Here are just a few things that have gotten me dropped by subscribers, my posts not distributed as actively by social media platforms (censoring), and a loss of readers:
- I sided with a political candidate (a few actually) and actively support them across my social media platforms.
- I have been doing some pro-life advocacy work on social media platforms as well. I would like to ramp this up more in future months.
- I have been encouraging social distancing and mask wearing so that people can protect themselves, the high risk, children who are high medically high risk, children who are in abusive homes that need to go to school, and to stop propagating the virus.
- I have been discussing the HORRORS that our children’s generation is facing to raise awareness and inspire change. This includes things in homes, schools, and other places. It also includes horrible laws that have been passes at state levels.
Promoting these things on my blog and across social media platforms (my largest being Pinterest, but Instagram (very small platform still) in my Instagram stories) and to my email subscribers has not gotten me very good traction. I have lost readership and reach of people to the tune of 600K dropping to 180K per month. SO, for October…I went downhill. Google adsense, amazon, etc all were sending me emails saying, you are dropping drastically etc. It sucks. BUT even just reaching a FEW people on these VITAL topics is enough for me to keep going with it because it is my hope that I can inspire them to reach a few people and it will make our world a better place. SO, if you see something that inspires you…SHARE IT!
Brie
