Thursday, March 22, 2012

Our Most Epic St. Patrick's Day

Please don't confuse this with The most epic St. Patrick's Day, because according to Pinterest, I am no where near that status. However, for our little family, this year's St. Patrick's day celebration was truly off the charts.

Now, our charts are pretty lame. In fact in 2010, Aaron called me in the middle of the day to remind me that it was St. Patrick's Day. In 2011, I'm pretty sure we completely forgot about the holiday. So any sort of effort on our part would fall into the "epic" category.

Now that Grace is a little bit older she gets excited for holidays. At Thanksgiving we did the Turkey Hunt, where she searched for turkey index cards throughout the house. She has asked to play that game a bizillion times since then, with a gentle reminder from us that we only play Turkey Hunt on Thanksgiving.

Enter St. Patrick.

In late February Target was selling little baggies of chocolate gold coins in the dollar section. I snagged a few bags and on the evening of the 16th we hid the coins all over the apartment. We taped one to Aaron's shirt the next morning and told Grace that a Leprechaun had come and hid coins all over, and he even was silly enough to tape one on Dad. Dora bucket in hand she excitedly began the hunt.
This Leprechaun was of the full-service variety and also left us some breakfast to satisfy our hunger after the intense coin hunt.

Grace was enjoying the Lucky Charms, eating mostly just the charms.
 Thanks to JoAnn's Fabrics and their 50% of St. Patrick's day decor.
For lunch we went dye free and had a green stir fry. Stir fry is kind of an obsession around these parts recently.
 In the afternoon we did a clover necklace craft (seriously, props to major sales at JoAnn's).

We all wore green and went out to dinner at Costa Vida, which has no holiday significance other than we had a free meal and it saved us some green (see how I worked it in there...high five).
 I think it's easy to guess who has the "Favorite Parent" spot in the bag.
We ended the day by reading books at the book store, which has nothing to do with the holiday either, but they were both wearing their green stuff so I tossed it in.
It was really fun to actually celebrate the holiday, especially since it fell on a Saturday and Aaron could partake in the festivities as well. I think we have started a few traditions that I hope to carry on.

Now Easter is on the horizon and I am trying to figure out how I can eat as many Cadbury Mini Eggs as humanly possible without having any caloric consequences....

5 comments:

Diana said...

Considering the only thing we did to celebrate (we didn't even wear green, lame I know) was to make mint choc. chip milk shakes, I'd say your day was definitely epic. And I love the pic of your fam. Seriously, you are one good looking pregnant lady.

Marc and Miriam Deru said...

Yay for delicious dye-free food. We had a big family dinner for which I dyed the dinner rolls. Blech. :) No, it was fun. Go you guys-- way to be festive! And you really are darling, Miss Prego.

Rachel said...

So sorry I have been absent from your blog for so long. I can see now what I miss out on, because your posts are so great. Anyways, on to St. Patrick - basically I LOVE St. Patrick's Day, but I've been incredibly lame about it the past couple years due to procrastinating any planning (which makes me want to cry), so I loved seeing that you had an epic day. And I say DOUBLE high five to your Costa Vida saving green tie-in. That was amazing. Oh, and reading books? Those pages come from trees that are totally full of green.

Dyanna Stephens said...

I've never really put forth the effort for St. Patricks day either... but I may just have to try next year. You have some great ideas.

Ashby said...

Well you certainly outdid yourself this year! We didn't even wear a single thing that was green. But thank you for NOT dyeing any of your food!!! Huge pet peeve.