We Love Green And Lucky The Leprechaun

I'm part Irish on both sides, so I love celebrating St. Patrick's Day. I didn't get many pictures this year, but I want to remember what we did to celebrate. The Saturday before St. Patrick's, the city of Dublin (CA, not Ireland), which is right next to us, had a St. Patrick's Day parade and festival. I dragged my family along with me to go to both.

The only pictures I got at either the parade or the festival were on these old tractors, which I had taken for my brother who works on a hay farm and loves tractors. I remember that it was pretty cold at the parade since we were under the freeway ramp, and that most of the people skipped right over my kids with all the candy and goodies. The parade went for quite a while. We still had fun though, and we came home from the festival part with a little pink guitar for Baylee and a tiny drum thing for Payton.

I began my St. Patrick's day by dropping Baylee off at preschool and then dragging Payton all around town trying to find chocolate gold coins. It took five stores before I actually found some. Later that afternoon, I spent 4 hours making a yummy dinner and dessert.

Every year my family has corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. Since I don't know how to cook corned beef, and since Ben doesn't like it and his parents don't eat that kind of stuff, we had cabbage and turkey kielbasa instead. I also made smashed red potatoes with herbs and Irish Soda bread, and we served dinner with a limeade/rainbow sherbet slush drink. I was pretty excited to eat this dinner. And for dessert:

Thin Mint cupcakes! They had a mint buttercream inside and a mint chocolate ganache. They didn't turn out quite as yummy as I hoped (note: always use peppermint extract, not mint extract for buttercream unless you really love toothpaste), but they were pretty good. We were happy to have Mike, Laura, and Abby join us for dinner too.

The next morning, Baylee and Payton had a surprise waiting for them. Lucky the Leprechaun had stopped by our house the night before (he had been a pretty busy little leprechaun with all the St. Patrick's day stuff), and spilled gold coins where he had walked.

The gold coins stopped at the table where he had left a bunch of little things for Baylee and Payton on the table, along with a few more coins. Baylee was so excited and I guess Ben told her all about Lucky the Leprechaun (who happens to look a lot like the leprechaun of the Lucky Charms box). She still talks about him, and was even asking us and her grandma and grandpa to call him so he could come visit for three days. Sorry, Baylee, Daddy lost his number and the rest of us don't know Lucky on a personal friend level like Daddy does! If anyone else has his number, I'm sure Baylee would be your best friend forever! I wonder if this is why my kids are loving Lucky Charms lately?