well-moisturized pumpkins

this past weekend, mosaic had its first fall festival at their pasadena site. food, booths, those inflated bouncing thingies, and candy, candy, candy. our life group decided to do a pumpkin puzzle booth, so on thursday night, we set about carving pumpkins...for the third year in a row...something about our life group...it's like every year we forget how messy and labor-intensive it is to carve pumpkins so we have to remind ourselves. (just kidding...carving pumpkins is fun! yes, there's a hint of sarcasm in that...hehe) so anyways, we had these little patterns (stars, leaves, bats), then we realized that since we were carving on thursday and the fall festival was sunday, we had to keep our pumpkins and the pieces from drying out and shriveling up. one of the pattern books suggested putting vaseline on the cut edges, so jen and shuwen went on a target run and came back with a tub of the stuff. after we were finished carving, we faithfully slathered our pumpkins with vaseline, covered them all in saran wrap, and went home with amazingly soft hands.

fast-forward to sunday...the vaseline worked...a little too well. our pumpkins were shiny they were so well-moisturized. the vaseline didn't wipe off too well, and then you got pumpkin innards to deal with...good thing we had wipes for the kids to clean their hands with, tho those ran out toward the end. it was the best seeing some of the kids get grossed out by handling the pumpkin pieces and wiping their hands on their costumes to the chagrin of their parents...but for the most part, they were really good sports and their love of candy prevailed, so most of them finished their puzzles.

highlights from the fall festival:

- the in-n-out truck...nothing like having in-n-out delivered to your church, tho the line was looong...
- mr. incredible
- james losing a pumpkin puzzle race to a 10-year-old girl and having to get a make-over as punishment.
- the one kid who loved our booth so much that he insisted on doing all 8 of our pumpkin puzzles, and the "extremely difficult" one at least 5 times.