Let’s Get Personal: Pumpkin Carving with My Family

Today doesn’t really lend itself to wanting to blog about weddings. While weddings are beautiful things – a gorgeous reminder of love and happiness; there is something to me that I find even more important: family. As we all watched the “Superstorm” Sandy ravage the East Coast these past few days, we are reminded just how precious and important the loved ones in our lives are.

For those of you that don’t know me personally, my family is extremely important to me and we try as often as we can to be together. It is becoming increasingly harder as we are now mostly spread out across the Eastern seaboard (my brother in CT, my parents in NJ, my sister and brother in law in Philly, and my younger sister down in DC near Andy and I). But last weekend we got a chance to spend some time together and then Saturday morning half the family was around to carve some pumpkins!

Welcome to Pumpkin Carving with My Family:

The classic “before” shot that my mom took of our pumpkins. And then the carving began:

My mom is concentrating pretty hard on her pumpkin and here is Jill (it’s her birthday today!) and her husband Tom focusing on theirs:

Andy told me he had our pumpkin ‘covered’ as he knew exactly what he wanted to carve. I was responsible for taking the insides of the pumpkin out – and then he worked his magic with this wonderful knife.

Naturally, our pumpkin had some sort of fabulous mustache. Andy carved it out – and I then told him we probably should have carved an outline of a ‘stache, not the entire stache out. Advice that Andy told me “would have been useful before he carved it”.

It’s a good thing he did carve it out though, because I got to snag this BEAUTIFUL portrait of myself rocking a pumpkin mustache.

In the end, here is how our pumpkins ended up! The first became a glittery ’30’ (it’s Jill’s 30th Birthday), a beautifully carved “BOO” by Tom, A George Washington-looking pumpkin carved by my Mom, and of course a Mustache Jack-O-Lantern by Andy.