Happy St. Patrick's Day!

St. Patrick's Day doesn't seem to be much of a holiday to celebrate unless you like drinking green beer. I always try to at least wear something green and since Morgan has been with us, we've always made it to the local St. Patrick's Day parade. This year, on top of wearing green and watching a parade, I decided to have a little more fun this Irish holiday!

Rich, Morgan, Blake and I went to the local parade on Saturday. We have made it a tradition to do our grocery shopping before the parade and we make sure to pick up plenty of snacks! We then get to the parade early and park right on the main street and snack on our goodies (including the green frosted Lofthouse sugar cookies-yum!) and wait for the parade to start. (It's usually so cold that we don't want to wait outside, but this year it was fairly nice!) Rich's brother happened to be a couple blocks away, so he came and watched the parade with us this year. Morgan had a blast! She waved to everyone, picked up every last piece of candy and collected all the green beaded necklaces that were being handed out. She was all smiles the whole time! Beyond the parade, I decided to make some Irish food after seeing the recipes on education.com. Rich and I have made corned beef sandwich's in the past, but this year I made a Shepherd's Pie. I switched up a couple ingredients, like making homemade mashed potatoes and using some frozen mixed vegetables instead of frozen peas, but it still turned out great!


I also made some Irish Soda Bread for the first time. I love to bake, but this is one baked good I had never tried before. It turned out great and is actually almost gone (after 2 days!) I don't like raisins in baked goods and I still thought it was delicious!

Beyond all that, I also wanted an activity that I could do with the kids. I came up with making some green play dough for them to play with. We used shamrock cookie cutters to make some green shamrocks and I also got a little creative by making three play dough worms then spiraling them, so they were like the leaves. I then put them together and added a stem. All our little shamrocks turned out super cute and the kids had a blast! Morgan could play with play dough for hours! (She seriously sat and played with it for 2 hours straight once. I thought that was pretty good for an almost 3 year old!)

I had a great time doing a little extra for the St. Patrick's Day this year and I think Rich and the kids did too! I hope to make it tradition for the years to come! :-)
If you would like to try any of the recipes, just follow the links. Have a Happy St. Patrick's Day!