St. Patrick's Day 2012 Part 1

Did you know that my siblings didn't even wear green today? Honestly, I have no idea how I'm related to these people. I go all out for holidays- and for some reason LOVE St. Patrick's Day. Love it. Probably comes from that wee bit of Irish heritage I'm sure everyone has.

For this St. Patrick's Day, I invited my nieces over for sleep-over/party. Miriam (7) and Claire (4) love to get down and when Claire walked in the first thing she said was: "We're here and ready to party" in the most matter of fact voice a 4 year old can muster.

Party we did. We colored pictures, ate popcorn, played the Wii, danced to music and played that game where you can't show your lips but have to say a fruit.*

Because the girls are on sugar ban for this month, we made some green smoothies instead of cupcakes. They loved putting in the spinach and fruit and taking turns hitting blend. At one point, Claire said: "This is so fun!" and I felt like the coolest Aunt in the world. Also, it wasn't stressful at all. We were all sincerely having a blast.

Miriam decided to give herself some green smoothie mustaches and they kept getting bigger and bigger. She wins for best mustache, for sure.

Before bed, we set up a leprechaun trap. Sure, on Pinterest you see super elaborate traps but I thought ours was simple and convincing enough.

Claire told me that she wakes up easy so she would probably see the leprechaun. I told her we didn't want to scare him and have him runaway so she should close her eyes real tight instead. About an hour after putting the girls to bed, Claire came to my door and told me that she didn't want the leprechaun to see her and runaway. Apparently, this was the topic of conversation between the girls for the whole hour after we put them to bed. We moved the trap to the kitchen.

In the morning, we saw that stinkin' leprechaun had caused all kinds of mischief- turned over chairs and knocked down vases. Even some "lucky" confetti all over the place. Crazy enough, he somehow got all of our noses green, too!

"What the heck?!" -Miriam's reaction upon looking in the mirror

Is there something on my face?

We got excited when we saw that the trap was closed, but we found this note instead of the leprechaun

Ha-Ha! Better Luck Next Year!

Dang. Missed him again. Lucky for us, though- he left some Lucky Charms cereal. He also dyed our milk green.

 Claire yelled- "That leprechaun got into EVERYTHING!"  

When Emily (2) got here with her mom to pick up the girls, we found out that he also left a scavenger hunt for us to find a treasure. I forgot to take a picture of my soup pot filled with the goodies wrapped in cute bags and tags (thankyouverymuch), but each girl got some of the loot.

Bow, socks, shamrock sunglasses, bubbles, glowstick and  $1

Scott asked Emily what she was going to do with her dollar and she said: "Umm... put it in my bag." Then she carefully placed it back in the plastic bag.

Success.

Right now, we have some corned beef, cabbage and potatoes in the crock pot as per our annual tradition. This day ain't over yet.

*They love this game- instead of fruit we did St. Patrick's themed words. Try saying Irish without showing your teeth. Hilarious.