St. Patrick’s Day 2017

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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Loaded with tattoos and ready for school! It was nice to finally have a fun and stress free morning.

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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.

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Pretty good this year!

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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.

IMG_1137 jalapeno pizza

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.

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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!

St. Patrick’s Day 2015

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Another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. This has always been one of my favorite holidays simply because I love any good reason to celebrate and being Irish is a great one. 🙂 It seems like the last few years the excitement of the day has gotten lost between chaotic schedules and crabby kids. I was looking back at my photos from last year and realized we never even took family photos – my favorite part of the whole day! I expect my kids were just as crabby last year as they were this year – I just powered past the crabbiness this time!

Anyway, our annual holiday breakfast has changed over the years, but we’ve kind of settled into a Lucky Charms routine because it’s so easy and it feels like a special treat since I don’t usually buy any kind of sugary cereal. Sometime in the night a leprechaun usually sneaks in and leaves a pile of golden coins and mustard (because it’s gold and my boys are obsessed with eating mustard). This year the leprechaun could only find giant bags of gold coins, so the boys each took some to school to share with their classes.

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We’ve lived here for three and a half years and I have never seen a rainbow appear in my bedroom until St. Patrick’s Day. I thought it was definitely worth taking a picture of. 🙂

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Since it was a special day and they got dressed so easily I let them check their street passes before school. Then we dropped Caden off and Shepard and I proceeded to have a very busy day of errand running. We had a Taco Bell lunch with grandma, stopped to play with Uncle Tyler and all my mom’s dogs while she’s on vacation, and then I had my final visit with the sleep doctor. My three month CPAP experiment is already over and I decided to give it back. It was a very hard decision, but after all this time I honestly didn’t notice any difference whatsoever in how I felt during the day. All it turned out to be is this really stressful and annoying nuisance that woke me up over and over again through the night. Not worth it.

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I guess I never took any pictures of dinner, but here are our desserts. We actually had our halfway traditional Irish dinner on Monday with baked chicken, glazed carrots, rainbow potatoes, and soda bread. On Tuesday we simply had shamrock shaped ravioli from Costco. Gotta love an easy dinner! Dessert was sugar cookies for the guys and pistachio cake for me.

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It was a VERY crabby afternoon, but I managed to rally everyone for the annual – except for last year – family photo shoot.

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I forgot to focus my first batch, but I’m including this picture anyway because it has everyone’s best smiles. 🙂

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A week ago Shepard figured out how to cross his eyes and now it’s his favorite thing to do. I was a little annoyed to look at all the pictures I took afterward and see that he was crossing his eyes in almost all of them!

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In other life updates, since I’m still terrible at writing at all regularly, the biggest news is that we recently rearranged our apartment so I could have my own sewing room. I was starting to go crazy always stepping on legos, constantly needing to spread out while I work, but not having the room to do it. Or at least not the room to do it and keep it out as long as I needed. Greg has offered to switch with me in the past, but I always dismissed the idea. This time I decided it was worth the effort. We’re still far from getting settled in, but I think it will eventually work out great. I’ve also been very busily preparing for a craft fair tomorrow and Saturday, so beyond getting all my stuff IN my new sewing room, nothing is organized or hung up or displayed prettily yet. Greg’s new area in the living room is still a total mess of hundreds of cords and cables and whatever other crazy tech things he’s collected over the years. It’s all quite stressful!!! Hopefully next week we can get it all settled in properly and then I’ll post some pictures!

 

Anyway, for fun, here’s a little walk down memory lane. St. Patrick’s Day in 2009.

 

 

2010

 

 

2011

 

 

2012

 

 

2013

And no 2014. I will forever regret it!! Anyway, hope everyone else had a great St. Patrick’s Day too!

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St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Today is one of my favorite days of the year. I grew up in a very Irish family and we always made a huge deal over this holiday. I also love the color green and Ireland is my favorite place in the world. So St. Patrick’s Day is a pretty awesome day around here. 🙂 This year was especially fun because Caden was really excited about it!

All week long Caden has been telling me, “We need to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day. When are we going to get ready for St. Patrick’s Day?” I’m still not really sure what he expected of me and I feel like I let him down a little bit. He came running out of his room this morning and immediately asked me where all the St. Patrick’s Day people were. I asked if he meant leprechauns and he did. He then proceeded to spend the next two hours searching the house for a leprechaun. I wasn’t sure if I should encourage him or let him know he wasn’t going to find one so he wouldn’t be too disappointed. I ended up not really saying anything and he just kept looking. Fortunately, the leprechauns left them some gold and silver coins and a present. Notice Caden is carrying his leprechaun catching net with him. 🙂

Shepard was a little out of it this morning and couldn’t figure out what was going on.

A very creepy picture!

Our Irish breakfast of soda bread and green milk.

I tried a new recipe today and didn’t really like it at all.

Every year we do a family photo shoot in our St. Patrick’s Day shirts. After a lazy morning nobody was really in the mood to get ready and pose. Shepard also started covering his face up today, thinking we can’t see him when he does that.

All I wanted was for them to stand next to each other for one minute to get a nice one! Shepard wouldn’t have anything to do with that and Caden must have gotten mad too because he’s doing his latest punching pose. He knows he’s not supposed to hit people, so now when he gets angry he goes right up in their face and just holds this pose. Not nice!

And two seconds later Caden was ready to be a perfect model. It was pretty hilarious how he suddenly started striking all these poses. It has something to do with having my camera on the tripod, I guess. I’m not used to him being so cooperative when my camera comes out!





He’s had enough!

Shepard decided Caden was actually having fun and decided to join in.

When I see pictures like this I think that Caden must be growing really fast and/or Shepard just isn’t changing at all. Their height difference just keeps getting bigger and bigger!

Time for some self timer shots. Greg, as usual, is still getting ready while the rest of us wait!

And finally the family shots! I set up the self timer to take ten shots at a time, but because of the lighting or something there was a 30-60 second gap between every photo. So instead of the usual ten very similar shots in a row, we had enough time to change everything up in between. Which resulted in no perfect picture, but I like them all anyway. 🙂

And now, because I did it last year and I think it’s fun to look at – here we are through the years:
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
And that’s it for photos for the day! The rest of the day wasn’t terribly exciting. We went to Greg’s parents’ for lunch and hanging out. Then we came back for naps. Had a dinner of lucky pasta and shamrock ravioli. And now Greg and I are about to finish the date with some homemade mint chocolate gelato. It was a really good day!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!