I love everything about fall. The weather, the leaves, the clothes, and of course the pumpkins! I’d carve pumpkins in August if I could. But the neighbors think I’m weird enough as it is, so I hold back.
Lucky for me, my son loves pumpkins, too! The bigger the better. The problem is a 3-year-old just can’t carve a pumpkin. And how much fun is it for him to watch me do it?
So this year we tried some new pumpkin tricks that he could actually do!
I didn’t expect this to work, but it actually did! It was easy for my son to do, and the color held well. But it apparently wasn’t exciting enough, and after a few minutes he asked for the paint.
I also didn’t have high hopes for this one, but it also worked pretty well. Even though it’s finger paint, I gave my son a paint brush, though I see no reason fingers wouldn’t work just fine, too. The coverage was a little thin, but considering how easy it is to clean up this paint, that was fine with me. However, Crayola’s website says you can expect any washable products to run when exposed to moisture. So we’ll see how it holds up outside. You could add a sealer to help protect it or just keep it inside.
Acrylic Paint
So this made me really nervous, as the paint can do much more damage than good old Crayola washable stuff. But we put on old clothes and found an old towel, and tried it.
At my son’s request I drew a picture on the pumpkin and then let him paint it in. The paint went on well and was easy for my son to use. But he of course used too much at a time, and it dripped a lot. I guess it makes it look a little scarier? This would probably be a lot more successful with older kids.
Push-Pin Decorations
These were really hard for my 3-year-old to do. It takes a decent amount of strength to push the decoration through the skin of the pumpkin. And the decorations I bought were apparently a little cheap, so I actually broke a few trying to get them in myself. I got a kitchen knife to dig a hole in first, and that helped. Despite the struggle, I think the end product is the cutest of everything we tried. So this might be good for you if you’re just looking for fun pumpkins and don’t really care about the process.
Stickers
This was our winner! The stickers are really cute. And my son could actually peel them off himself. So on his own he could pick which sticker he wanted as well as put it where he wanted. There was a lot of “Mom, I’ll do it myself!” going on, but that’s OK. He enjoyed it so much, we ended up decorating three pumpkins with the stickers. He would have done more, but we ran out of pumpkins! The package came with enough that you could do at least twice that. After two weeks the stickers are holding up well outside. We’ll see how much longer that lasts. But it can’t be any worse than a moldy pumpkin.
Bonus for all of the above products – they’re easy to find and inexpensive. We bought each for less than $7 a piece at our local Walmart.
Happy pumpkin decorating!
