Read the Best Books First: Pumpkin Carving 2022

Guess what time it is? That's right. Time for our annual pumpkin carving post. And let me tell y'all, this year—and the last few months in particular—have been so busy that it almost didn't happen in time for Halloween. I was in Florida last week for a wedding, and when I got home, I was hoping to carve our pumpkins on Sunday because I was 100% positive that Sunday was, in fact, Halloween. Seriously. I would have bet you good American money that yesterday was November 1st. So I was trying to figure out how to carve like, a turkey or a cornucopia or something Thanksgiving-y into my pumpkin (because we can't throw the whole tradition out just because we're a day late) when my sister-in-law called me and helpfully reminded me that it wasn't November yet.

So after Cody was done with work yesterday and we'd had a super-yummy dinner, we found our pumpkin carving tools (no small feat in our recently moved into basement) and kept our Halloween pumpkin carving tradition alive. And since I mentioned it: we carved our pumpkins in the basement of our sixth (and hopefully last because I never want to move again) home-sweet-home together.

I like him.

It's becoming one of my favorite parts of this tradition to look back at all our pumpkins of years past and reminisce about where we were and what was going on in life that year. This year, we had a lot going on. We bought our second home and moved for the second time in a six-month period. We joined our church in North Carolina. I quit my job delivering packages for amazon and started watching a baby boy from church a couple days a week. Cody traveled most of the summer for work and also went on a missions trip to the Republic of Georgia. We {semi}renovated our basement and moved the rest of our stuff into our house (which felt like the third move in the span of a year and a half). It's been wild, but it's been good, and I'm thankful to God for all His good gifts to us and that I'm still carving pumpkins with this guy eleven years later.

This year, Cody picked up a couple of jumbo pumpkins from Ingles and we kept it simple with some classic jack-o'-lantern faces. I think these are the biggest pumpkins we've ever gotten!