Real Parties: Kids Carving Party

Sorry for the blogging silence!  I really don't have any specific excuse other than the normal busy with kids and playing catch up!
My family grew up carving pumpkins together every year and we still regularly get together to carve.    This past weekend we had a casual carving party at our place.  Super easy and fun! The night before I ran out to the dollar tree, grabbed a few things for some decor, and that was that. The best thing about this party was that from the set-up to the clean up it was kid friendly. Asa (he's two in a half by the way) was able to help me decorate everything.  He helped me make the cookies, cut them out, and patiently sat spreading the icing with a toothpick.  I was impressed at how careful he was! He even held off eating them until his friends and cousin came over. (My mom's sugar cookie recipe is really the best. I did a faux royal icing which tastes better than actual royal icing, but nothing beats a buttercream so I added on some canned last minute.)

I got a bunch of googly eyes at the dollar store and Asa and I taped them on the cups and plates.  He saw Monster's Inc recently so this made him extremely excited.

Yup.  Here's my crazy helper.

I despise mice.  I have a phobia of them.  My sister-in-law picked these up for one of our parties a couple years back and I held on to them.  But it really took a lot for me to handle these things.

Plastic tablecloth from the dollar tree works great for cleaning up all the pumpkin goop. 

Mummy dogs have been popping up all over pinterest so we got some crescent dough, cut it into strips, and wrapped them up.  Asa helped wrap them up too!  Great kid activities.

When it came to the actual carving part, well the kids headed downstairs and we carved.  My brother does extremely detailed pumpkins.  He created cinderella's pumpkin coach a week ago for his daughter!   (The garland in the background there is just a package of foam pumpkins from the dollar tree stapled to black ribbon.)

They spent the evening doing a bunch of this.

The finished product.