St. Patricks food and crafts: in progress…

I feel like getting into the festive mood for tomorrow.  Yesterday I posted a bit about what we’ve done for St. Patrick’s Day before, today I’m trying to get a couple things ready for tomorrow.  I’m thinking a lot about food, too because my nephew and my daughter’s bdays are right about St. Paddy’s day!!  Clicking around on Pinterest, I saw lots of fun ideas, and since I love rainbows so very much right now, I thought I’d try rainbow jello parfaits…you know, as in the “end of the rainbow” that’s where you find the pot of gold! 😉  So I’m working on that right now…it’s time consuming and mine is not turning out professional looking like the blog where I found it here: http://glorioustreats.blogspot.com/2012/03/lucky-rainbow-jello.html, but I guess Glory has made them a few times, and has all the “bugs” worked out!!  Here’s what they look like so far:

As I work on the layers and layers of jello, I thought of “encouraging” my daughter to make something to “recycle” the jello boxes.  She didn’t want to at first, but I threatened her, and that worked fine!  So now she’s busy making something cool out of them…

Another little “green” craft is a frog out of pop bottles.  Of course I found this idea on Pinterest…Cut the bottoms out of two 2 -litre green pop bottles (I’m Canadian, ok?!eh?!), for the head and body.  Then with your handy dandy glue gun, glue strips of felt around the sharp edges, and a small rectangle at the back for a hinge on froggy’s mouth.  Glue on the 2 pop tops as eyeballs, then add details with the glue gun: lips, freckles, cheeks, and around the  eyeballs.  A just-for-fun craft!  We have been using it to store our ABC flashcards that we made the other day…more on that later.  Here’s froggy:  (this was actually our Leap Year craft, heh, heh)

I’ve also printed out some St. Patrick’s Day old-fashioned greeting cards from the Lucky digital kit from my previous post.  Haven’t quite figured out what I’m going to do with them, but will make some sort of decoration.

Now for some food planning for tomorrow….what to do?  I’ve made a pasta salad with lots of green bits in: cucumber, green onion, parsely.  A few years ago I actually made green bread!  Doesn’t look like I’ll get that done!  I was thinking we’d drink Root Beer Floats!  I know the kids will like that!  And yesterday I found this cool idea for a shamrock quiche on Pinterest, here’s the step by step instructions:   http://www.diamondsfordessert.com/2011/03/lucky-spinach-quiche.html I want to try it out!!

Are you planning any special food for tomorrow?  Just wondering….how about a lovely green sauce for your chicken??  green salad? green bread?  I’m not Irish, so I really don’t have too many ‘authentic’ ideas! 😉  We’ll see what I actually get done…..

here comes St. Paddy’s Day…

I admit it, I didn’t give my kids Valentines this year…not because I don’t, just because I was so tired…and made so many Valentines for school… I just didn’t get any made up for my darlings!  So, on the spur of the moment, I made up these St. Patrick’s day “cards” for them.  I’ll print them up and they can put the page into their scrapbook (I am not the type of mom who makes a scrapbook up for each of my children, beginning from their birth, and going through their school years. It’s a nice idea, but one that I won’t do for two reasons: I know I could never get it done and I wouldn’t want to give the book to them, I’d rather keep it myself! So instead of that, I sporadically make digital things, and am working on giving each of my children a digital book of random pages. Later on, I can save up $, then print out one for myself to keep. That’s the beauty of digital: you can make as many copies as you want! So worth it. I have given, well, or will eventually give, each kid an empty album where they can put these random pages that I print out for them, usually from their birthday wall-display.)  (Ha ha, I didn’t mean to brag about “spur-of-the-moment…with the digital kit I used, there were lots of pre-done elements which made it super easy and fun, see below)

We didn’t grow up celebrating St. Patrick’s day, we just wore green so we wouldn’t get pinched at school.  And growing up in Guatemala, Central America, it wasn’t a big deal, not very many Irish down there! 😉  But in the last few years, I’ve gotten into it.  And this year, I feel obsessed with rainbows, so I really feel like making decorations and food and stuff!!  I have appreciated getting to know the story of St. Patrick.  First from watching a great animated video made by VeggieTales about the life of St. Patrick.  I love it! Super cute and informative and well-done, great for young children (can watch it here: http://ministry-to-children.com/veggie-tales-saint-patrick-video/)  You should watch it if you can!!! 🙂  And in the last few weeks, I heard the audio story of St. Patrick done by Adventures in Odyssey, really really interesting and well done (this one is more for older kids and adults).  I missed a bit of it, but am hoping it will be aired on their podcast again soon! You can find the live podcast here: http://www.whitsend.org/ look at the bottom of the page where it says “listen live now!” for 24/7 great stories!! I’m sure you could buy the download of the specific St. Patrick story, but am not sure what the name of that series is.

Here is what I made today, for my kids.  Then I did a bit of research about an Irish ring which intrigued me, and lastly, a fun digital kit for St. Paddy’s day!

Photos of my kids by April Scott  http://www.aprilscottphotography.com/ (I added this so that maybe she’ll feel like taking some more up-to-date photos of the kids sometime, heh heh!!)  I love these photos of them, even though they aren’t super recent. 😉

And here’s the bit about the ring:

All the images I have used come from Paula Kesselring’s digital kit called “Lucky” the preview is below, and you can find it in the Catscrap shop here: http://www.catscrap.com/shoppe/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=66 scroll down about 4 rows  on the page to see the “Lucky” kit (it’s on sale right now), and beside it is a free desktop wallpaper with a calendar and St. Paddy’s stuff, cute!  Paula has some really really cute digital kits, I like her stuff!!! 🙂 also, more freebies on her facebook page   https://www.facebook.com/#!/paulakesselringdesigns

Bonus: The first person who notices “something in particular” about the journalling on my layouts, message me and I will make a Lucky layout just for you!! 🙂  (I just wondered who actually read down to the bottom of the post!! hee hee!)