Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Today is always one of my favorite days of the year! I love celebrating Irish heritage. I love Ireland. I love being Irish!
Growing up, my mom always made St. Patrick’s Day special by dying as many foods as possible green, dressing us up in as much green as we could manage, and painting shamrocks on our cheeks. It was simple, but very memorable, and something I’ve always wanted to do with my own kids.
A few years ago I started buying Lucky Charms, gold coins, and usually a couple of jars of mustard (because they’re gold…) and leaving them out in the morning as a gift from the leprechauns. This year I guess the date just snuck up on me and I was totally unprepared. Yesterday before school Caden asked if we’d be having that yummy cereal again in the morning. I was like ummmmm, probably? Totally slipped my mind. So I spent half the day searching a bunch of stores for chocolate gold coins to no avail. I was kicking myself for not being more prepared. I didn’t want to buy any more mustard either because I just bought and gave them a couple jars of fancy mustards a few weeks ago from the shop hop! Totally not thinking.
Anyway, preparations were a little more hectic with only one day to actually think about everything. But it turned out fine. 🙂 Shepard was so excited about the day that he was up and dressed at 5:30, dancing around the house. I don’t think he was even up that early on Christmas! He was most excited about the lone pack of Irish tattoos I found at Walmart yesterday.
We were up early enough I had time to make soda bread to go with breakfast. Way better than Lucky Charms! That’s probably the only traditionally Irish food we eat each year. I love the Irish, but not so much their food!
Loaded with tattoos and ready for school! It was nice to finally have a fun and stress free morning.
It was a typical Friday around the house. Lots of working. But after school I was all ready for our annual family photo shoot. It’s tradition.
Pretty good this year!
It’s Friday, so we needed to have pizza. We did have Costco’s shamrock shaped ravioli for dinner last night. Not Irish food either, but oh well. On a random note, when Greg and I went to Ireland ten years ago, Greg ate some sort of curry at every single restaurant we went to. I don’t think that’s Irish food either, but it was available everywhere. Maybe I should start making curry on St. Patrick’s Day! Delish. Anyway – I was hoping to try some new pizza tonight, so we made pretzel crusts! The dough had to be small enough to boil in a pan, so we all had individual pizzas. Shepard picked buffalo bacon, what a surprise.
Greg and I each had jalapeno popper pizzas, for a bit of green. They were so good! Though definitely all too big for any of us to eat an entire thing. I’m for sure making this pretzel crust again, though. Such a nice change from the traditional.
And finally, dessert. Another thing I wasn’t really prepared for this year. Late last night I was mixing up a hacked cake mix, planning to make a cake, and that felt too elaborate. So I ended up using my jumbo muffin pan to make gigantic cupcakes. Then when I was mixing up the frosting today I only had half the amount of powdered sugar I needed. So not in the mood to run to the store, I just pulled an unmeasured amount of butter mixture out of the bowl. The ratios didn’t really work out quite right. Still good, but far from expert level baking!!
That’s about it for our day! Simple, but special. I love making these memories with my kids and celebrating the littler things in life. It’s a good day!
