Painting Pumpkins

Well it is getting close to Halloween, and those pumpkins we picked ... well they still remained uncarved.  In my defense, we have been pretty busy around here and, well, I am moving pretty slow these days!  I did really want to at least decorate Jax's pumpkin and with an induction date set for the very near futre I knew it was now or never. I had seen several cute ideas on pinterest of how to decorate a child's pumpkin without carving.  I have a love/hate relationship with pinterest.  I love all the great ideas there are for decorating, meals, activites, etc.  However I feel that website (along with many others) contribute to the overwhleming pressure we (and moms especially) put on ourselves to do everything and make it look perfect.  I love that there are entire websites devoted to "Pinterest Fails" where real people try to recreate an idea from pinterest with hilarious failures as results. 

Well I found a great idea to use a kid's hand print to make "eyes" on a pumpkin and then paint a mouth.  Easy enough and I thought Jax might like trying out his finger paints.  I knew this might get messy and luckily my mom will usually indulge me in these fantastic ideas of mine.  So we laid a shower curtain liner out on the patio, stripped the little one down to a diaper and attempted our hand prints.  The results ... well they were less than stellar.  If you have ever tried to get a 18 month old to hold their hand still while covered in paint you have an idea of what the final project looked like, two big blobs of paint on a pumpkin.  I still thought it was manageable until the paint started to dry and peel off.  Apparently regular finger paint isn't the best for sticking to pumpkins.  

  

 Luckily, we had a back up pumpkin and I decided to just let Jax do his thing.  

Here was the end result.  I think we might have a budding Picasso on our hands!

 

So here are our four little pumpkins this year.  One for each of us with a little one for baby Gary as well!