How Dairy Farmers Carve Pumpkins

Halloween is over. The rest of our country is now decorating Christmas trees and tackling holiday shopping. (It seems that Thanksgiving has once again been overlooked.)

But I still have a skeleton hanging on my patio and a jack-o-lantern sitting on the porch. There are still some Halloween cookies in the container on the counter. And, thank heavens, the kids' collection of candy from trick-or-treating hasn't been polished off yet . So it's not too late to write about all the fun we had with Halloween this year.

About that jack-o-lantern...

I'll let you in on a little secret: There is nothing about carving pumpkins that appeals to me. Well, the carving part isn't so bad. It's cleaning the pumpkin out that makes me gag.

But, from the way my kids talk, carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns ranks right up there with Santa Claus coming. So, for my kids' sake, I steeled my stomach and we managed to get one of our pumpkins carved after chores one night.

During chores that night, as I was dreading the upcoming carving, I had an idea. An ingenious way, if you ask me, to make pumpkin cleaning much more tolerable: an AI glove.

The kids thought that using a glove was hilarious and, of course, insisted upon using the glove to help.

 

The glove worked really well. And so did the canning lid I used to scrape the pumpkin guts off the shell. Next year, maybe we'll get all three pumpkins carved.

About the cookies and the candy...

My favorite part of Halloween this year was baking Halloween cookies and decorating them with our friends.

I stayed up late one night to roll and cut sugar cookies... by myself. I love baking and I love my kids, but, sometimes, baking with kids can be tricky. Baking by myself is a treat. A quiet, peaceful treat.

I also tried a new recipe for chewy chocolate cookies that the kids could frost and decorate with candy.

Cookie decorating with five kids was a little bit crazy and a lot of fun. So fun that I didn't manage to take any pictures during the decorating. But I did get one of the finished cookies.

And, we really didn't need any more sweets in the house, but I took the kids trick-or-treating anyway.

My little dragons and ladybug and I hope you had a fun Halloween, too.