Pumpkin Carving Family Home Evening

Things never work out the way you envision them in a family. I was excited to do our annual pumpkin carving with the kids last night. Because of some rather annoying work/financial circumstances (that I will blog about at some point) we have not done a lot of our usual fun stuff, like the pumpkin patch trip and all. When asked if I have been excited about Halloween my emotional response is generally, "NO, we have no money." But, John's parents gave us the pumpkins that grew in their garden and I had kept the fact that we had pumpkins a secret, so yes this time I was excited. I was excited enough to get dinner made and finished early, and to even load the dish washer for Ruth so we could get straight to pumpkin carving. At first the kids were like, "How can we carve pumpkins when we have no pumpkins?" I just sent them to do the chore of getting the pumpkins out of the car. While removing the pumpkins from the car, Ruth, Kate, and Johnny chose the ones they wanted with only a small tiff. Everyone seemed pretty happy. Since we only had 2 pumpkin carving knifes, John and I cut the tops off of all of the pumpkins. At first things were fairly calm. Joseph went to sleep, Rachel and Anya didn't seem to mind taking turns and everyone was intrigued with or disgusted by their goop enough to be pleasantly busy. We sang a couple of Halloween songs and, John got the camera set up on the tripod to take some pictures of our happy family. Not too long after that things started to slowly change. Anya took her diaper off and began climbing on the table. That led to some good, "don't try the lemonade jokes", but she started struggling and getting grumpy as John tried to wrestle a clean diaper on her. So our peace was broken up by a 1 year old's screams. Adam finished de-gooping his pumpkin first. He wanted to put a pattern on his pumpkin to help him carve a face, so I taped one on. As the other kids began finishing they wanted to tape a pattern on too. John was annoyed with this. Said he, "I like you creativity better!" I gave Rachel a pattern, but she just began bawling that it was not staying on, she needed more tape, etc. So now we had a 3 year old's screams added to the 1 year old's. John and Kate argued and eventually Kate decided to do what Dad wanted and created her own face. Around this time Ruth walked a round the table and stepped on a sharp cookie cutter used to clean out the pumpkins and gouged her foot pretty badly. John got a bandaid on it right away, but this put a definite damper on the fun. Because we only had 2 carving knives I decided it would work best if we took turns cutting out one feature at a time. Adam and Johnny did this very well, but Ruth and Kate did not. Fortunatley by the time Ruth and Kate were unhappily taking turns, Anya had settled down. Things were okay.

About the time I finished helping Johnny and Adam carve pumpkins,  Joseph woke up hungry. I took Joseph into the other room to feed him. While I was feeding Joseph, Anya came in, took off her diaper again and began dancing around naked. But she soon decided she wanted her diaper back on. She tried to put her wet diaper back on her bottom and when that failed she put it on her head. Okay so now a bath became a must. I finished feeding Joseph and put Rachel and Anya in the bathtub together. Joseph would not be out down, so I had to hold him or listen to him scream. I wanted to take a few pictures of this event (we hadn't really gotten to that much, and Ruth, Rachel, and Anya were all bathing--Ruth in a separate tub.) So John took Joseph while I tried taking a few pictures. While taking pictures, we heard some serious gagging coming from the little girls bath. John went to check and Rachel had puked in the bath tub. John was still holding Joseph. I put Rachel over the toilet, but their was still puke in the bathtub with Anya. I grabbed Joseph and put him down so he started screaming. Adam came into the bathroom (arrg) to check out the sight. But we kicked him out. I got John the cleaning stuff. He started the tub draining and the cleaning of the bathroom. Because we had already had two baths going and filled all of the way, we had to shower Rachel and Anya off in luke warm water. While I was showering off the screaming girls, John was trying to solicit the older kids to hold the screaming baby and clean up the huge pumpkin mess while he finished cleaning the puke mess. Kate picked up Joseph and he spat up all over her. We had to help her with that. Finally, we got Rachel and Anya in their pajamas, gave up on the kitchen/pumpkin mess for a time, and put Adam, Rachel, and Anya to bed. I then cleaned a bunch of the kitchen mess, but gave up on that as Joseph was still crying. I fed Joseph and read to the older kids, and John finished the kitchen mess, and then put Joseph in his bed for the night. Instead of a happy, fun family night. I think we were all just relieved when it was over, but disappointed that it was not fun. Maybe we will all be well and happy for trick or treating and have a great Halloween.