Painting Pumpkins

I am not good at crafts and projects. In Kindergarten I was in the special, pull out class for bad cutters and pasters. I don't think it helped me much. But my little Caterpillar loves a good project, so I decided to give it a try. I saw an example of how to paint pumpkins using painters' tape on one of my favorite blogs and decided that even I could probably handle this.

I wasn't excited about the prospect of carving pumpkins with a 2&3 year old. What is there for them to really do? Plus, again, I am bad at things like that and Tim is not here, so I gave that idea up awhile ago.

So, while Timmy napped, Cate and I got to work. We put the tape all over two pumpkins and then carved out a jack o lantern face for her with an exacto knife.

That process took me 45 minutes, so Timmy got a much easier giant T on his pumpkin.

When Timmy woke up, I gave each of them a lovely palette on a paper plate.

Timmy's face cracks me up. I imagine that he is thinking, "I can't believe that she is giving me all of this messy paint!"

I told them that they could paint with whatever colors they wanted and do whatever "designs" they wanted to on their pumpkins.

Cate painted her hand, as she's done in school, and gave her pumpkins a few handprints. Timmy needed to be hosed down a few times during the process.

When all of the paint finally dried, we pulled up the tape and voila! Two cute pumpkins.

Two confessions. One: I did go back and doctor their pumpkins a little bit. They used so much paint and mixed it so much that it really just looked like they painted their pumpkins brown. So I tried to go back and add some color. Two: I clearly did a bad job on the mouth of the jack o lantern. It's way too big and his top tooth is hanging somewhere in the middle of his mouth. Oh well. This is pretty good for me.