Happy St. Patrick's Day!

After a couple of weeks of leprechaun tricks and laughter, the big day finally arrived! We donned our green clothing and celebrated with a big breakfast, a final visit from the leprechauns, and a delicious Irish dinner. 

The boys woke up to these adorable green bins filled with lots of great green fun and games from the leprechauns (almost entirely procured from the $1 Store): giant glasses, silly bobbing headbands, Irish ties, beach balls, green jump ropes, green bubbles, green candy, sour cream-n-onion sun chips, and of course, Lucky Charms!


 

We enjoyed our happy little family breakfast together with our Lucky Charms, and of course green milk and orange juice (the colors of the Irish flag, afterall). The boys loved the shamrocks hanging over the table!

After an afternoon at Moto-X (our gift to the little man), we enjoyed a yummy late lunch of corned beef reuben sandwiches on rye, cheesy beer soup, and the requisite green beer.

Those Pesky Leprechauns!

Being that my husband and I are both half Irish, we figure that somehow that makes our kids 100% Irish...two halves make a whole, right? So, St. Patrick's Day happens to be one of our favorite family holidays! The leprechauns make yearly visits to play tricks on the kids, leaving them a little piece of gold each time as an "apology". We build leprechaun traps to catch them, and we just spend the first half of the month having some jolly green fun!

We dyed the milk green and served with leprechaun mustache straws.

They brought in every stuffed animal from the house to cover his bed. 

Apparently, even when a leprechaun relives himself, it's also green. The "footprints" were courtesy of some green tempera paint, the pained outside of my fist (the foot), and a painted pencil eraser (the toes).

  

The leprechauns brought magic "seeds" (green Skittles) with directions to plant them in sugar and wait patiently for the green sugar cookies that resulted. The anticipation was killing him!

Crayola bath fizz tablets are the best ever! The boys loved their green bath (just use 1 blue tablet for every 2 yellow).

The leprechauns moved his entire bed into the bathtub (he lasted in there for about an hour).

They scattered his clean laundry all over the upstairs. He followed the trail to find a bedtime snack.

The spinning rainbow with the gold treasure hanging underneath was the source of a lot of laughter!

This was the absolute favorite trick of the week! Thanks to the miraculous safety pin, when he went to grab his underwear at shower time, out came the whole lot! He laughed for a long time!

We love getting creative with our leprechaun trap building. We created the box in colors of the Irish flag with a rainbow on top to "trick" the leprechauns into thinking they'd find gold. The leprechaun hat with gold pieces and a fake "top" was a hit, also.