St. Patrick's Day Fun

Blogger, my pictures, and my new computer were once best friends.  There was a falling out.  The details aren’t important.  We’re slowly working to patch things up.  In the meantime, my tech nerd husband has worked tirelessly to come up with a solution to let me *try* to blog again.  We will get through this difficult time together.

Here’s the blog post I tried to write when everything fell apart.  Now I’m just trying to publish my post about St. Patrick’s Day before Easter gets here!

St. Patrick's Day brings out my inner Fun Mom.  It's not the actual holiday that gets me excited; it's the chance to do fun stuff with food.  Just part of who I am.

I tend to stick with "green" as the theme rather than Irish.  So I browsed Pinterest (of course) and gathered some ideas for this year's Green Day.

When the kids came out to the kitchen for breakfast, they found Trix cereal and Lucky Charms (a rare treat in our house) along with some cute notes.

The Trix free printable is from Smart School House, and the Lucky Charms free printable is from Blue Skies Ahead.  I found that Lucky Charms idea on a roundup on the blog Happy Home Fairy.  I got lost for HOURS reading posts on Happy Home Fairy.  Seriously, I got sucked into her stories of everything her family has gone through with a very ill baby.  I wish we were friends in real life.

We didn't really do anything special for lunch on St. Patrick's Day.  Nolan couldn't even eat lunch because he had to have a tooth extracted.  That wasn't in my original St. Patrick's Day plan.

I tried to fill our dinner with as many green foods as possible.  And of course there were multiple desserts.

The kids have fun polka dot plates, and mine is boring blue.

Our main dish was Zucchini Bites (using zucchini I had frozen from my garden last year!), and our sides were sugar snap peas and kiwis. 

After the kids ate their dinners, they got TWO mystery desserts.  I made them eat them to guess what they were.

Are you curious?  One was pistachio pudding (first time any of us had ever tried it), and the other was Jolly Ranchers Green Apple Jello.  The kids were expecting lime, so it took them a bit to identify the flavor.  Nora kept calling the pistachios "acorns," and Nolan liked the flavor but got totally creeped out by the texture of the pudding.  It actually made me laugh nearly to the point of peeing.

I even made the kids a special drink.  I froze Lemon Lime Koolaid in ice cube trays.  I put a few green ice cubes in each glass and poured Sierra Mist (one of the only Nolan-safe sodas) over the ice.

After dinner we went to watch Jared's basketball game.  I bribed told the kids that if they behaved well at the game, I had extra desserts back at home.  It's clearly overkill, but I just can't help myself.

I had made key lime bars and green Rice Krispies treats with Lucky Charms marshmallows.

Boy those photos are not good quality!  But I don't want to push anything since I JUST got Blogger to upload my pictures at all.

I used the Creamy Lime Bars recipe from Eat, Live, Run.  I saw a bag of key limes at the grocery store and decided to use those.  Unfortunately, we do not have a citrus juicer.  I squeezed an entire bag of teeny limes by hand.

I used the St. Patrick's Day Rice Krispies Treats recipe on Classy Clutter.  I opened a box of Lucky Charms and separated a bunch of marshmallows from the cereal.

I was using an opened box of Rice Krispies for this recipe, and I didn't have quite enough.  Then I had a bright idea--I used the Lucky Charms cereal!  I actually really liked the crunch the Lucky Charms cereal added to the final treats.

See?  I told ya I'm a sucker for holiday food fun.

Aaaannd, I finally completed a whole blog post without my pictures disappearing, losing all my progress--twice, or the website crashing.  Yes, all those things previously happened just while I was trying to write this post.

I hope to see you back here again sometime before the seasons change!

Jessica