St. Patrick's Day

I didn't like St. Patrick's Day growing up. I thought it silly to wear green and I certainly didn't like people pinching me. I was in a bind every St. Patrick's Day. Now that I am a mom and get to watch kids get excited over virtually anything, I am all about St. Patrick's Day. I confess I had to look up what it was about. All I could remember was leprechauns, 4 leaf clover, and rainbows. I learned that St. Patrick's Day is a religious holiday (wouldn't have guessed that one) and that it celebrates when Christianity came to Ireland. I figured I could get on board with celebrating that.

So we had a visit from a sneaky leprechaun who used our toilet during the night. How do we know there was a leprechaun in our house since we didn't actually see him? Easy. He didn't flush the toilet after he was done. It was green. Emma loved it! She reasoned that he didn't flush because he didn't was because he didn't want to wake us up in the middle of the night. It was a very considerate and sneaky leprechaun.

Emma got dressed in regular clothes and then pointed out to me that she didn't have grean on and could get pinched. So I appropriately chased her around the house until I caught her and pinched her. I must say, she is fast. Like super fast. I actually didn't stand a chance of catching her while she was going in circles around the kitchen. It wasn't until she ran into my room and stopped on my bed that I caught her and pinched her little cheeks. After that she was dressed in green. It was so important to her that she have green on that she wore a hair clip with a tiny amount of green on it to ballet.

Emma wanted to call Aaron at work to see if he was wearing green that day. To her delight, he wasn't. So immediately she and I started plotting how we would ambush Aaron and pinch him when he got home. She asked me wear I was going to pinch Aaron. I told her I would go for the bottom. I asked her wear she wanted to pinch him and she said the arm. I found it funny that she thought about that level of detail.

For dinner we had corn beef and cabbage, potatoes, carrots, Irish soda bread, sunshine salad, and then we had mint chocolate chip and brownie milk shakes. This dinner was a combination of inspiration from Russell and Anderson families. The dinner was inspired by Grandma Marsha. She happens to  to be the most festive person I know. The milk shakes were from Anderson family tradition. When I was little, my parents would take us out for Shamrock shakes at McDonald's. It was all authentic and stuff. The kids loved it. It has been a while since I have seen John eat as much as he did. Of course the milk shakes went over quite well.