Pumpkin painting

Many blogs I follow have been posting fall decorating ideas and projects.  I look forward to doing projects with Luke and thought we'd start now.  It didn't quite work.

We got a small pumpkin from my parents' garden and it had been sitting on our back steps for over a month.  Since Luke can't carve a pumpkin and I've carved exactly as many as he has I thought maybe he could paint it.  Specifically we could put his hand print on the pumpkin.  It would be cute.  I could take a picture a remember this fall when he was just a baby.  However, it didn't quite go as planned.

By Halloween I still hadn't done this and figured we better before the pumpkin started to rot (how long do pumpkins last??).  So, I got out paint and brought the pumpkin inside.  When he got up from his second nap I stripped him down to his diaper (it was time he got out of his pjs anyways) and squirted some paint on the lid of a sour cream container.  I put the pumpkin on the Aldi's ad.  I rubbed his little hand in the paint and tried to press it onto the pumpkin but a paint covered hand attached to a wiggly little boy didn't produce the best results.  This is what we got:

So we tried again.  More paint and another big smear.

Then I thought maybe we'd try his foot because those usually wiggle less.  So I wiped off his hand as best I could and then rubbed his foot in paint and put it on the pumpkin:

That worked better but his pinky toe does not stick out like that in real life.  But it was at least somewhat clearly a foot.

Then we had used most of the pumpkin and I decided we weren't getting anywhere so that was the end of our little project.  I washed off his hand and foot in the sink and washed all the paint off my hands too.  Miraculously we both avoided getting paint on my clothes or his diaper and the floor.  That alone makes this project a success.

Maybe next year he'll be big enough to paint a pumpkin on his own.  I think that will go better with the pumpkin but suspect his clothes won't be as lucky.