St. Patricks day...

We had a really fun St. Patrick's day.

This year I am trying to beef up our holiday traditions and our "must do's" were severely lacking on this fabulous green holiday. For the last bunch of years we usually have green french toast for dinner and the kids get green shirts to wear all day!

I have one requirement for any new tradition that I add... it MUST be something I can easily do EVERY year. I don't want to start anything TOO crazy that will become burdensome in years to come.

So along with the traditional new $5 green shirts my school age kids got a "lucky penny" to carry in their pockets all day...

The day before I whipped up little bags full of gold goodies with a note on the back of the tag to put in the kids school lunches. Can I just say I LOVE knowing how to use photoshop elements...it makes creating quick tags like these a snap! I even made one for Travis and stuck it on his dashboard for him to find when he left for work.

The kids ate Lucky Charms for breakfast....they all thought this was super exciting because we usually buy the off brand bagged cereal so eating the real Lucky Charms was such a treat! (like I said...totally doable every year!)


Bailey came home from school with this super cute leprechaun mask. She said that her class walked around the halls at school looking for "Lenard" their class leprechaun with their masks so that he wouldn't know it was them! She also said that Lenard put a trap on the bowl of treats on her teacher's desk...so that when she ate a treat from the bowl it would turn her toe green...sure enough...when her teacher took off her shoe and sock for the kids her whole big toe was GREEN! Bailey thought it was SUPER funny!

For dinner I decided to branch away from our usual green french toast. I found a recipe for a yummy all natural green fruit smoothie. It was a hit! (4 C baby spinach, 1 1/2 C orange juice, 1 banana, and 2 C any light colored fruit. I used frozen peaches, mangoes, and pineapple.) You couldn't taste the spinach at all and it turned the smoothie a fabulous green color with out the need of food coloring!

I also prepared pasta salad, a family favorite, using Wacky Mac a rainbow colored package of noodles. My friend made green rolls for our families and I prepared the rainbow jello for both families. The jello was AWESOME to look at and turned out just like the pictures on the recipe, however it wasn't much fun to eat. It had the consistency of jello jigglers...kinda tough and thick. This was also a bit time consuming as you have to wait for each layer to set up...had it been better to eat it would totally be a new tradition...but I'm thinking this might have to be a one time thing!


We finished off our dinner with Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream for dessert! All in all I am pleased with the new traditions that I added.

ps...The only one that we will be doing that we didn't do this year is hiding the leprechaun treasure box in the moon light the night before...my box wasn't quite ready in time. My sister sent us this idea a few years ago and the kids love it so check back next year for that one!